Still laughing: Dick Van Dyke dances to 100
At age 99, in preparation for his 100th birthday in December 2025, famed actor and optimist Dick Van Dyke optimistically released his book: 100 Rules for Living to 100.
Van Dyke admits in his book that there aren't actually 100 rules, but the reader will certainly find more than 100 nuggets in his description of his life and 75 years in show business.
Born in 1925, the son of a salesman in West Plains Missouri, Van Dyke started his career in show business in 1947 as a mime in a comedy duo. By 1959 he made is Broadway debut in The Girls Against the Boys. In 1961 he began the hit sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the iconic Mary Poppins in 1964.
He's never really stopped working, even though he says he is "super old." His sight is bad. His hearing is bad. Like the old man characters that made him famous, he admits he stoops, shuffles and teeters. He suffers the sorrows that come with age: the loneliness of losing his friends and family.
Still, he says, he doesn't let those things define him. "Instead for the vast majority of my years, I have been in what I can only describe as a full-on bear hug with the experience of living…doing life — not like a job, but rather like a giant playground," he writes.
Today, he says his wife, Arlene, 46 years his junior, keeps him laughing and moving, even doing a bit of soft shoe with him in the kitchen.
"I've made it to one hundred, in no small part, because I have stubbornly refused to give in to the bad stuff in life," he writes.
