At 99, Dick Van Dyke Shares Two ‘Don’ts’ He Credits for His Remarkably Long Life

Dick Van Dyke is weeks from turning 100, and he says the secret isn’t diet or exercise. It’s what he refused to let inside his own head. The Mary Poppins star, set to hit the milestone on December 13, opened up in a new interview about the two things he’s spent a lifetime avoiding, and he says they’re the real reason he’s still here.

Van Dyke told People magazine he’s simply never been able to hold onto rage. “There were things I didn’t like, people I don’t like and disapprove of,” he admitted. But something in him always stopped short of real fury. That restraint, he says, wasn’t an accident. It was a habit he built and kept, one that he now credits as the foundation of everything else.

“I’ve always thought that anger is one thing that eats up a person’s insides, and hate,” Van Dyke said. He calls it his “brighter outlook,” a phrase that sounds simple until you consider what it’s carried him through. Decades in Hollywood, personal loss, and the ordinary wear of a very long life. He never let either emotion take root. What he leaned on instead is where the story turns next.

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Van Dyke’s Wife Arlene Is Half His Age, and He Says That’s the Point

If avoiding anger and hate cleared the path, Van Dyke says his wife Arlene is what kept him walking it. She’s 54, exactly half his age, and he doesn’t treat the gap as a footnote. He calls their relationship the single biggest reason he hasn’t hardened into someone bitter or withdrawn in his final decades.

“Without question, our ongoing romance is the most important reason I have not withered away into a hermetic grouch,” Van Dyke wrote in a recent health diary for The Times. It’s a striking admission from a man about to turn 100, crediting romance over routine. But he doesn’t stop at gratitude. He gets specific about exactly how much younger she makes him feel.

“Arlene is half my age, and she makes me feel somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters my age, which is still saying a lot,” he said. It’s a rare, almost mathematical honesty about aging. Yet in that same diary entry, Van Dyke admits the arithmetic doesn’t always work in his favor, and what he says next is far less upbeat.

“Every Single One of My Dearest Lifelong Friends Is Gone,” Van Dyke Admits

For all his talk of a brighter outlook, Van Dyke doesn’t pretend turning 99 is painless. In that same Times diary, he said he feels “diminished” both physically and socially, a rare crack in the upbeat persona he’s maintained publicly for decades. What follows is one of the starkest lines he’s ever put in print.

“Every single one of my dearest lifelong friends is gone, which feels just as lonely as it sounds,” Van Dyke wrote. It’s a blunt admission from a man who built a career on warmth and comedy. Yet even outliving nearly everyone he came up with, he hasn’t slowed down. He recently released a book built entirely around lessons like that one.

The book, 100 Rules For Living To 100, pulls directly from moments like this. “Each rule springs from a story in my own life, which I believe has stuck itself in my memory for a good reason, because it had some broader emotional significance for me,” he said. Grief made the list. So did something far lighter, and it shows in how he actually feels day to day.

“I Feel Like I’m About 13,” Van Dyke Says of Life Near 100

Despite everything he’s lost, Van Dyke insists his daily mood hasn’t caught up to his age. “I feel really good for 100. Sometimes I have more energy than others, but I never wake up in a bad mood,” he said. “I feel like I’m about 13.” It’s a strange, almost jarring line to hear from a man weeks from a century, and he’s not just talking about energy.

Van Dyke isn’t chasing personal remembrance either. Asked about his legacy, he shifted the focus entirely away from himself. “But it’s the music, the music we leave behind,” he said. For an actor who also starred in a Coldplay music video last year, it’s a telling answer, one rooted in what audiences will keep long after he’s gone.

“For as long as children are proudly belting out their new word, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, or singing and skipping along to Chim Chim Cher-ee, the most important part of me will always be alive,” Van Dyke said. Four Emmys, a Tony, a Grammy, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame all sit behind him. But it’s that line, not the trophies, that he wants remembered. He put it simply: a life he “can’t complain” about.