Dick Van Dyke shares his key to staying alive for a century as he turns 100.
Dick Van Dyke is officially 100 years old. Born on Dec. 13, 1925, the “Mary Poppins” actor took Hollywood by storm with his singing and dancing, and became an Emmy, Grammy and Tony award-winning legend.
Legendary actor Dick Van Dyke celebrated his 100th birthday on Saturday.
See his life in photos. https://t.co/4Nuq6eyRRP pic.twitter.com/af27KkfHkW
— ABC News (@ABC) December 14, 2025
Now, Van Dyke has earned a new title: centenarian. Over the course of his life, the performer has shared the practices he follows to stay in the best of health.
The legendary actor has shared his secrets for a long and healthy life.
“The funniest thing is, it’s not enough. A hundred years is not enough,” Van Dyke said in an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America, which aired Friday. “You want to live more, which I plan to.”
“When you reach 100, a lot of things don’t work too well,” Van Dyke told The New York Times last month. But “sometimes I feel like I’m 15 again.”
But his big secret for making it to a century? The gym.
Van Dyke, who lives in Malibu, Calif., says he and his ‘health nut’ wife Arlene Silver go to the gym several times a week.
“I think that’s saved me from the pain,” he said on GMA. “That’s good advice for anybody.”
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In his new book, 100 Rules for Living to 100, Van Dyke wrote, “If I miss too many gym days, I really can feel it — a stiffness creeping in here and there.”
“I usually do a circuit, going from one machine to the next without a break, in a circle. I start with the sit-up machine,” he wrote. “Then I do all the leg machines religiously because my legs are two of my most cherished possessions. And then the upper body.”
Van Dyke sings in between sets. “The secret ingredient is the music,” he wrote. “Most of my humming and singing really happens when I’m going from one machine to another.”
“By the end, I’m in a sweaty rush, the blood flowing from fingertips to toes, and my spirits are soaring,” he wrote.
“That’s good advice for anybody, of course,” he said.
Silver is 46 years younger than him, and he says his wife ‘keeps me young’.
“She gives me energy, she gives me humour and all kinds of support,” he praised.
“Somebody said, ‘To what do you attribute your age and physical condition?’ I said, ‘I’ve always exercised’. Three days a week, we go to the gym still. Three days a week,” he explained.
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He still sings a lot
The podcast host, Ted Danson, said he’d seen Van Dyke there: “If I got there [to the gym] early enough, I would see you literally work out on some weight machine and then – almost like you were doing circuit training – you would not walk to the next machine, but dance. You literally danced to the next machine and I watched that for a couple of weeks.”
The Tony, Emmy and Grammy award-winner told NBC’s Today show that he also sings every morning.
“Singing is the best thing you can do for yourself,” Van Dyke said. “Usually I’ll wake up with an old tune going through my head.”
Van Dyke continues to perform with his a capella group, the Vantastix.
And in 2024, just before his 99th birthday, Van Dyke appeared in a Coldplay music video, singing “All My Love” with Chris Martin.
His wife makes him feel like ‘a teenager’
Van Dyke credits his 54-year-old wife, Arlene Silver, whom he met in 2006 and married in 2012, with giving him energy.
“She keeps me young,” he said on Today. “We sing. We dance. She just keeps me a teenager.”
Van Dyke offered more thoughts about her in his book:
Without question, our ongoing romance is the most important reason I have not withered away into a hermetic grouch. 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. Every day she finds a new way to keep me up and moving, bright and hopeful and needed.
He is positivity
He also swears by his positivity and good humour, telling PEOPLE: “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, but I never really was able to do a white heat kind of hate. My father was constantly upset by the state of things in his life, and it did take him at 73 years old.”
“When you expire, you expire. I don’t have any fear of dearth for some reason.
“I can’t explain that but I don’t. I’ve had such a wonderfully full and exciting life. That I can’t complain.”
“No one is genetically miserable,” he writes. “No matter our current circumstances, we all have the capacity for a joyful life.”
“I’ve made it to 99 in no small part because I have stubbornly refused to give in to the bad stuff in life: failures and defeats, personal losses, loneliness and bitterness, the physical and emotional pains of ageing,” he added. “That stuff is real but I have not let it define me. Instead, for the vast majority of my years, I have been in what I can only describe as a full-on bear hug with the experience of living.”
He also confessed to kicking some bad habits, saying he wasn’t always as healthy: “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. So I got rid of booze and cigarettes and all that stuff, which is probably why I’m still here.”