Elastic limbs, fantastical accents and crackling sexual chemistry: Dick Van Dyke turns 100

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The goofy star of Mary Poppins becomes a centenarian on Saturday. And what a precocious performer he has proved, sustaining scrappy mischief through seven decades of mainstream entertainment All Hollywood stars grow old and die except perhaps one - Dick Van Dyke - who turns 100 today. The real world Peter Pan who used to trip over the ottoman on The Dick Van Dyke Show is still standing. The man who impersonated a wind-up toy in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn’t wound down just yet. He has outlived mentors, co-stars, romantic partners and several studios. He’s even outlived the jokes about his performance in Mary Poppins. These days his mangled cockney accent is regarded with more fondness than contempt. It’s seen as one of the great charms of the 1964 classic, along with the carousel chase or the cartoon dancing penguins. Charm is the magic ingredient of every popular entertainer and few have possessed it in such abundance as Van Dyke, the impoverished son of a travelling cookie salesm...
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‘I lied to get the part’: Melvyn Hayes on his ‘angry young man’ beginnings – and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum

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He was tipped to be the next Richard Burton – but ended up as crossdressing Gunner Gloria in the now controversial sitcom. As his breakthrough classic returns to the screen, Hayes looks back

One day in 1957, Melvyn Hayes was on the set of a film called Woman in a Dressing Gown when a man sat down next to him. “I was getting paid £5 a day and I’d been on location for three days,” the actor recalls. “All I had to do was walk up to a house and put a newspaper through a letterbox. That was my part. Finished. I said to this bloke, ‘I can’t believe the waste of money on this film. Take me. You could have got a newspaper boy on £1 a day to do what I’m doing.’ Then I said, ‘What do you do then, you lazy bugger?’ And he said, ‘I’m the producer.’”

Hayes, now 89, giggles at the memory of the cheek of himself at 23. Back then, £5 a day was a decent whack. His first job in showbiz, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to The Great Masoni, a magician who tasked Hayes with “disappearing twice daily for £4”. His chief film role so far had been in the 1955 drama documentary The Unloved, in which he played a boy in a home for delinquent kids.

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