Dick Van Dyke turns 100

Summary

All Hollywood stars grow old and die except perhaps one - Dick Van Dyke - who turns 100 today. The real world Peter Pan who used to trip over the ottoman on The Dick Van Dyke Show is still standing. The man who impersonated a wind-up toy in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn’t wound down just yet. He has outlived mentors, co-stars, romantic partners and several studios. He’s even outlived the jokes about his performance in Mary Poppins. These days his mangled cockney accent is regarded with more fondness than contempt. It’s seen as one of the great charms of the 1964 classic, along with the carousel chase or the cartoon dancing penguins.Accent on the charm … Dick Van Dyke with Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. Photograph: Donaldson Collection/Getty ImagesCharm is the magic ingredient of every popular entertainer and few have possessed it in such abundance as Van Dyke, the impoverished son of a travelling cookie salesman who dropped out of high school and educated himself at the movies. “His job in this life is to make a happier world,” his Broadway co-star Chita Rivera once said - and this may explain his stubborn refusal to quit, not while times are tough and he feels that audiences still need cheering up.Naturally his workrate has now slowed, but in the past few years he has competed on the TV show The Masked Singer, starred in a Coldplay video and enthusiastically stumped for Bernie Sanders. Van Dyke simply couldn’t understand why America’s older citizens were resistant to Sanders’ democratic socialist domestic policies. He said, “I want to urge my generation to get out and vote for him, please.”Too much energy … Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/ShutterstockAs he nudges into triple figures, he has become a piece of living history: a walking, talking chronicle of US showbusiness itself. Van Dyke began his career performing for the troops in the second world war and proceeded to rub shoulders with the likes of Phil Silvers and Walt Disney...