How Dick Van Dyke Went From TV Legend To Beloved Film Star & Almost Was 007
The story goes that after Sean Connery nixed the idea of returning to play James Bond, the film’s producer, Albert R. Broccoli, considered a unique choice as the next 007 — TV star Dick Van Dyke. The conversation with Van Dyke turned out to be a short one. “Have you heard my British accent?” Van Dyke asked in reply. One can just imagine him as that iconic spy, lighting a cigarette and in a broken cockney accent announcing, “Bond … James Bond.”
With great — and all-too-typical — self-deprecating humor, Van Dyke has skewered the infamous inflection he used in his most famous movie role, Bert the musician/artist/chimney sweep, in 1964’s unforgettable Disney musical Mary Poppins. But forget the accent; it would be difficult to conjure up a more charming, witty and wise character than Bert, who opens the film wearing and playing an assortment of instruments in an energetic and warm routine set to the song “Step in Time.” And then, Bert narrates the action, introducing us to a world of wonder instigated by both him and Mary — played joyously by Julie Andrews.
Everett Collection
By then, America knew very well who Dick Van Dyke was, having watched him weekly for years on one of television’s top hits, The Dick Van Dyke Show. They’d also seen him reprise his Tony-winning stage role in the 1963 film Bye Bye Birdie, during which he’d coerced costar Janet Leigh, his love interest in the film, to “Put On a Happy Face.” One of the great joys of seeing Van Dyke on any screen was how he could add a song-and-dance routine to any comic scene.
What followed among his more prominent roles is a “comedy with teeth,” as Roger Ebert called the 1967 satire Divorce American Style, directed by Bud Yorkin and written and produced by Norman Lear, the duo who would go on to create All in the Family. Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds play bored, feuding marrieds who decide to untie the knot and soon learn that doing so is a lot harder than staying together. The Oscar-nominated script gave two of Hollywood’s favorite stars lots of scathing lines, but really, could they end up apart?
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The following year, Broccoli finally got his man — for a production based on a story by Bond creator Ian Fleming that was the furthest thing from international intrigue. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a crazy musical fantasy anchored per usual by a singing and dancing (and loving dad of two) Van Dyke as unsuccessful inventor Caractacus Potts, who hopes to buy a scrapped car by selling a new kind of sweet to the Scrumptious candy company. He eventually gets the auto, turning it into the title’s floating and flying machine and even woos Truly Scrumptious (Sally Ann Howes), heiress to the candy company. The film was a family hit, despite the nightmarish central story about a “child catcher” working for an evil baron. Everyone ultimately lived happily ever after, floating on tunes by the Sherman Brothers, who’d done the honors four years prior for Mary Poppins.
His films got more serious in the 1970s
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Plenty of folks considered Van Dyke’s next major role — the title part in the 1969 dramedy The Comic — a downer, but it allowed the star to re-team with his Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, and to pay tribute to his idol, Stan Laurel, and other silent film legends. In the film, Van Dyke plays a silent-era comedian who is undone by his own hubris. “We were proud of it,” Van Dyke later said.
The actor was back alongside Lear for the 1971 satire Cold Turkey, playing a reverend determined to help his Iowa townsfolk split $25 million by quitting smoking for 30 days.
A different addiction takes center stage in the 1974 TV movie The Morning After, a film with nary a laugh that Van Dyke was extremely proud to make. In it, he plays a successful public relations writer whose life and career unravel due to alcoholism. Van Dyke was Emmy-nominated for the role that struck a major chord with the star, one of the first to go public about his own longtime battle with the bottle. As Van Dyke once said, “The director [Richard T. Heffron told me], ‘Look, you know more about this subject than I do. You take it from here; I’ll follow you.’ And he let me go in those scenes, and it was the smartest thing he ever did.”
He made a comeback in the 2000s
20th Century Fox Film Corp./courtesy Everett Collection
There’s no small irony in Van Dyke later costarring in two of Ben Stiller’s Night at the Museum films (2006 and 2014), the first premiering when he was in his early 80s, playing one of three security guards whose possession of a Pharaoh’s Golden Tablet increases their vitality. “Vitality” is a word that very much applies to the international treasure. It was especially the case with his 2018 cameo in Mary Poppins Returns, playing — at age 93 — Mr. Dawes Jr., son of the role he also played in the original (he was listed in the credits as Navckid Keyd before the letters magically rearranged to form his real name). “There was a lot of ugly crying” the day he came to perfectly perform his monologue and do a sweet little dance on a desk, said the film’s star Emily Blunt. Word was, when Van Dyke was done, director Rob Marshall, who considers Van Dyke his great hero, was too busy weeping to say, “Cut!”
That’s the effect the man has had in his movies. As his Bert tells Mary Poppins in the 1964 classic, after the rain has washed away his magical street drawings, “Well, there’s more where they came from.” Thank goodness that proved beautifully true.
Remind 
100 Years of Dick Van Dyke
April 2025
Dick Van Dyke is a trailblazer like no other and one of the greatest of the golden age of television.
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