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 played the inventor of a magic flying car hasn’t run out of gas 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.
Charm 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.
