Dick Van Dyke has had his fair share of Hollywood adventures, but one of the wildest stories happened far from any film set—on a surfboard in open water.
The beloved Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang star once revealed that he dozed off while out surfing off Virginia Beach, only to wake up completely out of sight of land.
“I woke up out of sight of land,” Van Dyke said during a 2010 appearance on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. “I look around and I started paddling with the swells, and I started seeing fins swimming around me, and I thought, ‘I’m dead!’ ”
Luckily, what looked like circling sharks turned out to be something much friendlier: a pod of porpoises.
“They pushed me all the way to shore,” he said. “I’m not kidding, all the way to shore.”
Van Dyke shared the jaw-dropping tale again on the Really? No, Really? podcast in 2023, proving it’s one sea story he hasn’t forgotten—and who could blame him?
Now 99 years old, the Bye Bye Birdie legend has long since given up surfing, but he hasn’t slowed down much. While he missed a recent Vandy Camp event in Malibu due to illness, his wife Arlene Silver explained, “When you’re 99 and a half years old, you have good days and bad days … and unfortunately, today is not a good day for him.”
Even so, fans at the event were surprised to learn a fun fact about the star: he’s also a computer animator. Silver, 53, told the crowd that Van Dyke was credited for computer animation work on Diagnosis: Murder, the hit TV series where he played a crime-solving doctor from 1993 to 2001.
Van Dyke met Silver at the SAG Awards in 2006, and the couple tied the knot in 2012. They’ve been inseparable ever since.
In an April appearance at another Vandy Camp gathering, Van Dyke told PEOPLE, “I love what I do for a living.” Silver added, “[But] the minute he says that — the phone rings, and he’s like, ‘I don’t want to go there.’ If they come to our house, he will work all the time.”
Nearly a century into life, Dick Van Dyke still has stories to tell—and no plans to stop entertaining anytime soon.
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