Dick Van Dyke made a heartbreaking revelation about aging in his upcoming book, 100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life. In an excerpt posted by The Times, the beloved actor reflected on being a “super old” person as he approaches his 100th birthday on Dec. 13. Van Dyke then spoke about the loneliness he feels as the last surviving member of his group of friends and close colleagues.
“Every single one of my dearest lifelong friends is gone, which feels just as lonely as it sounds,” Van Dyke wrote.
The Chitty Chitty Bang Bang actor credited his wife, Arlene Silver, 54, for keeping him from becoming 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,” he noted.
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In a 2023 interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Van Dyke reflected on outliving his longtime friends Carl Reiner and Norman Lear, who died at ages 98 and 101, respectively. “My two favorite human beings,” he said of the late television legends. “Both gone, I can’t believe it.”
"Everybody I knew and worked with, there's no one left," Van Dyke said in the interview.
More recently, he told fans at a Dick & Arlene Van Dyke Present Vandy Camp event that he had been slated to team up with longtime friend Edward Asner for a remake of the comedy The Odd Couple. Sadly, Asner died in August 2021, at the age of 91, before the project came to fruition.
"That would've been such fun, and we lost it. I've lost a lot of friends," Van Dyke said in May 2025, per People magazine.
"He's outlived everybody," Silver said of her husband. "That's the curse of living to almost 100."
The legendary actor never thought he would live such a long life. “I’ve said if I had known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself,” he said in the CBS interview. “I went through that whole period of alcoholism, but my wife, God bless her, makes sure that I go to the gym three days a week and do a full workout,” he added.
Van Dyke has said that he is not afraid of death. In the director’s cut for Coldplay's music video for "All My Love,” in which the actor appeared in 2024, he said, “I’m acutely aware that I, you know, could go any day now, but I don't know why it doesn't concern me.”
“I'm not afraid of it. I have that feeling, totally against anything intellectual, that I'm gonna be alright," Van Dyke added.
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