The Hollywood legend Dick Van Dyke is just two days away from celebrating his 100th birthday. In a new interview, he’s revealing the two things that he gave up that he believes saved his life and allowed him to make it to this aging milestone.
Van Dyke Gives Up Two Things
Van Dyke, who turns 100 on Saturday, December 13, believes that getting rid of “booze and cigarettes” decades ago is what allowed him to make it to 100. He revealed this during a recent Vandy High Tea event that he hosted at his home in Malibu, California.
There, Van Dyke recalled meeting the legendary Walt Disney in the early 1960s. The pair of them worked together with Julie Andrews on the classic 1964 movie Mary Poppins.
Sadly, Disney would go on to die of lung cancer in 1966 at the age of 65. During the event, Van Dyke claimed that he’s “probably the last person alive” who met and worked with Disney.
“He was a wonderful guy,” Van Dyke recalled of Disney. “He just smoked too much! Doggone.”
Van Dyke’s son Barry Van Dyke, 74, spoke up to claim that his father “never smoked too much.” The former The Dick Van Dyke Show star, however, wasn’t having any of that.
“I smoked a lot, actually!” Van Dyke confessed. “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.”
It was then that Van Dyke expressed his believe that ditching alcohol and cigarettes is why he’s still alive today.
“So I got rid of booze and cigarettes and all that stuff, which is probably why I’m still here,” he admitted.
Van Dyke sought help for his alcoholism in 1972, and he’s been sober ever since. He simultaneously tried to quit smoking, a process that he’s said was “twice as hard.”
“It was much worse than the alcohol,” he remembered in a 2023 interview on the Real No Really podcast. Van Dyke went on to confess that it took him “forever” to quit smoking.
Van Dyke’s Positive Attitude
Quitting drinking and smoking isn’t the only thing that Van Dyke thinks has gotten him this far. Indeed, he also credits his longevity to his positive attitude.
“People say, ‘What did you do right?’ I don’t know. I’m rather lazy,” Van Dyke recently told People Magazine. “I’ve always thought that anger is one thing that eats up a person’s insides — and hate. And I never really was able to work up a feeling of hate. I think that is one of the chief things that kept me going.”
“There were things I didn’t like, people I don’t like and disapprove of,” he continued. “But I never really was able to do a white heat kind of hate. My father (Loren Van Dyke) was constantly upset by the state of things in his life and it did take him at 73 years old.”
Van Dyke’s father died in 1972 after a battle with emphysema.
Van Dyke Is Feeling ‘Really Good’
In the end, Van Dyke wants his fans to know that he is feeling “really good” for someone who is about to turn 100.
“Sometimes I have more energy than others — but I never wake up in a bad mood,” Van Dyke concluded.
Van Dyke is a true living legend, and the way he’s lived his life is nothing short of inspiring. We’d like to wish him a very happy early birthday, and many more to come.
God bless you, Dick Van Dyke!