The movie Dick Van Dyke has always hated with a passion: “I know how much he doesn’t like it”
You don’t get to live as long as Dick Van Dyke has by carrying around a ton of apathy, regret, and hatred, but there’s still one movie that the oldest active entertainer in Hollywood cannot abide, more than 60 years on from its initial release on the big screen.
The veteran, and that’s putting it lightly, when he’ll celebrate his 100th birthday on December 13th, 2025, is still going strong, and reiterated that age is only a number when he became the oldest actor to win an Emmy in the summer of 2024 at the youthful age of 98 years and 177 days.
Underlining how long his career has been, Van Dyke was nominated for his first Emmy in 1963, the year before he inflicted one of the worst accents in cinema history upon an unsuspecting world in Mary Poppins. He’s profusely apologised for his cockney brogue on multiple occasions, but the classic song-and-dance spectacular isn’t the picture he loathes with a burning passion.
Like most stars of his era, he cut his teeth treading the boards. Van Dyke made his Broadway debut in a 1959 production of The Girls Against the Boys, and he wouldn’t make his silver screen bow for another four years. When he did, it was with a role that he knew like the back of his hand. Or, at least, he should have.
He originated the part of Albert Peterson in Charles Strouse’s Bye Bye Birdie, and he played it from April 1960 to January 1961. When the time came for the musical to be given the feature-length treatment, there was only one feasible option, with Van Dyke reprising the role in his first motion picture outing.
It was a sizeable hit, with director George Sidney’s picture recouping its budget almost three times over at the box office and earning two nominations apiece at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes, including a ‘Best Picture – Musical or Comedy’ nod at the latter. And yet, Van Dyke thought it was a bust.
“Bye Bye Birdie, the movie, was a drag, because we couldn’t make out what it had been,” he explained to Ted Danson. The film helped make his co-star, Ann-Margret, one of the biggest stars of the decade, but the leading man wasn’t thrilled that so much of the stage show’s essence had been lost on the way to the movies.
“The Ann-Margret part was rather small on Broadway,” he said. “And they wrote special songs for her, and took other songs out, and it just changed the whole pitch of everything. Paul [Lynde, who played Harry MacAffee] was really pissed all the time. But that was just his nature.”
Unfortunately for Van Dyke, it’s generally seen as one of the best musicals of the ’60s, although he’d clearly disagree. He can’t escape his hatred for it, either, with his wife, Arlene Silver, revealing that it follows him everywhere: “A lot of people liked the movie, and it makes me laugh when people come up to him, because I know how much he doesn’t like it.”
