Dick Van Dyke has spent a lifetime making audiences smile — but as the legendary entertainer approaches his 100th birthday, he says the real secret to lasting this long has been learning to change his own life first.
According to Fox News, speaking at a recent Vandy High Tea gathering at his Malibu home, the “Mary Poppins” icon reflected on the choices he made decades ago that he believes are still protecting his health today.
“So I got rid of booze and cigarettes and all that stuff, which is probably why I’m still here,” Van Dyke told guests, according to People. Then came a confession: “I smoked a lot, actually! I think I was probably in my 50s before it dawned on me that I had an addictive personality. If I liked something, I was going to overdo it.”
He recalled meeting Walt Disney in the early 1960s and warmly described the animator as “a wonderful guy,” before adding a blunt assessment about Disney’s death in 1966 at age 65: “He just smoked too much!”
Van Dyke’s own battle with alcoholism led him to seek treatment in 1972. He later told the “Really No Really” podcast that speaking openly about those struggles mattered to him because he hoped it would help others avoid the same traps.
“I knew so many people who couldn’t get out of it,” he said. What began as casual drinking in a social neighborhood quickly turned into something he couldn’t control. “Before I knew it, I was hung up on this stuff. I couldn’t believe it. Same with smoking.”
He emphasized he never drank on set, but the impact off-camera was unmistakable. “An alcoholic will go from a happy drunk, eventually into a mean drunk and an unhappy guy,” Van Dyke said. “And I was getting testy, and I just hated it.”
Still, he admitted one habit was tougher to quit than the other. Giving up cigarettes, he said, was “twice as hard. Much worse than the alcohol. [It took] forever.”
As he approaches triple digits, Van Dyke says discipline and movement keep him sharp — and dancing keeps him joyful. In an essay for The Times U.K., he explained he still hits the gym three times a week.
“If I miss too many gym days, I really can feel it — a stiffness creeping in here and there,” he wrote. At the gym, he runs a full circuit: sit-up machine, leg machines he works “religiously,” and upper-body training. And in classic Van Dyke fashion, he turns the workout into a one-man show. “Most of my humming and singing really happens when I’m going from one machine to another. By ‘going’ I mean dancing. You heard me — dancing!”
But nothing, he says, keeps him young like his wife, Arlene, 54. They met in 2006, and she has become, in his words, his “soulmate and the love of my life.”
“Arlene is half my age, and she makes me feel somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters my age,” he wrote. Her playful energy — including dancing to pharmaceutical commercials until he joins in — keeps him moving, laughing and connected to joy.
He says the formula that has carried him to 100 is simple: “romance, doing what I love and a whole lot of laughing.”
And as he inches toward his centennial birthday, Van Dyke offers one piece of wisdom he believes outshines the rest.
“As I get older, I have found that life is more and more a comedy of errors,” he said. “So if you can’t laugh at yourself, you’ve got big problems.”
