American Legends ― The Life of Dick Van Dyke

“I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years.” – Dick Van Dyke

“I never wanted to be an actor, and to this day I don't. I can't get a handle on it. An actor wants to become someone else. I am a song-and-dance man, and I enjoy being myself, which is all I can do.” – Dick Van Dyke

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history’s most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors’ American Legends series, readers can get caught up to speed on the lives of America’s most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

If television was still coming into its own during the 1950s, it truly became a national phenomenon across America in the 1960s, and in an era where most Americans finally owned a television, one of the most popular shows on the air was The Dick Van Dyke Show. The show starred Van Dyke as a middle class writer who worked on a television show, and it also helped catapult Mary Tyler Moore (who played his wife) to superstardom and her own hit show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

To this day, it is widely considered one of the greatest television shows in history, and Dick Van Dyke remains best known for it, but the show was merely the peak of a career that had already proven quite versatile. Van Dyke had long aspired to be in show business and even a television show host long before television was popular, and he got his start as a radio DJ when he was still in his early 20s. Always a fan of comedy, Van Dyke parlayed that into a comedy gig, and he then rode the success of his comedic performances to starring roles on Broadway. Van Dyke’s skills and versatility ultimately helped make him a good choice to star in a television show in 1961, thus spawning the show that took his name.

The first 40 years of Van Dyke’s career would be impressive enough, but Van Dyke has also appeared in hit films, most notably Mary Poppins, over a span of about 50 years. In fact, he is set to appear in the latest installment of the popular Night at the Museum series, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which is scheduled to be released a week after his 89th birthday. Van Dyke has noted over the course of a career now spanning 8 decades that he’s “retired so many times now it’s getting to be a habit,” but as he once joked, “I've won several Emmys, a Tony and a Grammy, so maybe somebody will let me have an Oscar, and then I'll have a full set.”

American Legends: The Life of Dick Van Dyke chronicles the life and career of one of America’s most famous show business stars. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Dick Van Dyke like never before, in no time at all.