There’s a good chance the first time you ever saw Dick Van Dyke, he was dancing. On a rooftop with a chimney brush in “Mary Poppins.” Or tripping over the ottoman on his own TV show and somehow making a stumble look like ballet. He has been making people smile for the better part of seventy years, and he has never once seemed to be trying very hard to do it.
He turned 100 years old on December 13, 2025.
And here is the part that ought to be printed on a poster somewhere: he is still, this year, going to the gym three days a week.
“We go to the gym three days a week,” he told interviewers around his birthday. “My wife’s a health nut, and we work out.” Then he added the line that makes you put the magazine down for a second. “I don’t have any ache or pain.” A hundred years old, and no aches. “I’m so lucky,” he said.
The wife in question is Arlene Silver, decades younger than him, and by his own account the engine behind the whole operation. She’s the health nut. She’s the one who keeps the fridge honest and gets him moving on the mornings a hundred-year-old man might reasonably want to stay in his chair. He does not pretend otherwise. “I wouldn’t be 100 years old if it weren’t for her,” he has said, plainly, the way you state a fact rather than pay a compliment.
You might expect a man who has reached a full century to talk about slowing down, winding up, being grateful for the time he’s had. Van Dyke does not talk that way. Asked about the milestone, about actually being one hundred, he gave an answer that landed somewhere between funny and defiant.
“One hundred years is not enough,” he said. “You want to live more, and I plan to.”
He is not just saying it, either. He keeps showing up.
On the eve of his birthday he published a book called “100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life,” which is exactly the book you’d hope a man like this would write, and exactly the title he’d give it. It is not a medical manual. It’s a hundred years of a fundamentally cheerful person telling you, gently, that attitude is a muscle and you’d do well to exercise it.
Then there’s the small matter of the music video. In late 2024, at ninety-nine years old, Van Dyke turned up in the director’s cut of the video for Coldplay’s song “All My Love.” Think about that for a second. A man who was a television star when Elvis was young, sharing a screen with a stadium rock band that a teenager today would recognize, and fitting right in, because charm doesn’t have an expiration date and he has always had more of it than he knew what to do with.
It would take a long time to list everything he’s done, so here are just the landmarks. He was Rob Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” a role that basically wrote the rulebook for the modern TV comedy. He was Bert the chimney sweep in “Mary Poppins” in 1964, doing his own pratfalls and his own dancing and, famously, his own much-teased accent. He was the inventor in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” He solved murders for years on “Diagnosis: Murder.” And in 2018, in his nineties, he came back for “Mary Poppins Returns” and got up on a desk and danced again, because of course he did.
But the career is almost beside the point now. What people keep circling back to, what makes the 100th-birthday story land the way it does, is the way he’s doing the being-a-hundred part. Most of us, if we make it that far, picture a quiet chair by a window. Van Dyke pictures a gym three mornings a week and a wife telling him to eat his vegetables and a to-do list that isn’t finished. He seems genuinely puzzled by the idea that a person is supposed to be done.
He’ll tell you the secret isn’t a secret at all. Keep moving. Marry someone who’s smarter about your health than you are. Stay curious. And above all, stay on the sunny side, on purpose, as a discipline, the way you’d keep any promise to yourself. His whole book is really just those few ideas, dressed up a hundred different ways by a man who is living proof they work.
There was a stretch this summer, in fact, when a false rumor went around online, and a good many people were briefly convinced the world had lost him. It hadn’t. His own people had to step in and set the record straight: he’s fine, he’s here, stop believing everything the internet tells you. Which is its own kind of perfect, when you think about it. Dick Van Dyke, at 100, having to reassure everyone that reports of his slowing down have been greatly exaggerated.
So no, he hasn’t been up on any rooftops lately with a chimney brush. But he’s in the gym on Monday. He’s got a book on the shelves and a rock video to his name and a wife he credits for the whole thing.
And if you ask him whether a hundred years feels like a good long run, a nice place to stop, he’ll look at you like you’ve asked something faintly ridiculous.
One hundred years is not enough. He said it himself. And he plans to prove it.
