I have heard, though I cannot prove it, that the reason Bert’s accent is so egregious in Mary Poppins is that his dialect coach sabotaged it. The coach had wanted someone actually British to take the role. When Dick Van Dyke, from West Plains, Missouri, got the role instead, the coach got mad. When he was hired to help Van Dyke to sound Cockney, he decided he wasn’t going to do it.

Maybe it’s not true. Maybe he just isn’t good with accents. But if he is, it’s about the only thing that he isn’t good at. Heck, I read his autobiography a few years ago, and I was laughing the whole way through. While he wasn’t a trained dancer, you wouldn’t know it from his various musical numbers. He doesn’t have a spectacular singing voice, but it’s pretty good. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him carry a drama, but he’s one of the best comedic actors of the twentieth century. And the man can trip over an ottoman!

An image search for him shows that most of the pictures available online of Dick Van Dyke feature him smiling. This is true whether they’re movie stills or not. While I’m sure his life hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, perhaps his most distinctive feature is that infectious smile. Sure, there’s also that he’s kind of goofy-looking, but is it so very hard to believe that Mary Poppins would melt over that smile, at least the Disney version?

But even moving aside from Mary Poppins (and no one but me wants to talk about Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN), we will always have Rob Petrie. This, of course, made its way onto an episode of The X-Files, when Mulder and Scully were going undercover in suburbia, and Mulder got to pick the names. (“Rob and Laura Petrie. You know, like the dish?”) It’s been a while since I watched more than a few episodes of the show, but I remember its being remarkably egalitarian for its day. Both Rob and Laura had their foibles, and sure, she stayed home while he went off to work, but there’s at least one episode where, unlike Lucy Ricardo, Laura Petrie gets to be in the show.

I’ve seen one or two things where he wasn’t playing a very good guy, and it was jarring. Like when Tom Hanks or James Stewart play the heavy—it’s not that they’re bad at it; it’s that it feels wrong. Of course, in Dick Tracy, I’m not sure it felt earned. That was more a problem with the movie’s uneven script than anything else. However, it feels as though he never got—or possibly never wanted—the chances to expand his range that Hanks and Stewart have gotten. Or Robin Williams, with whom Van Dyke definitely has some parallels.

Including, it has to be said, addiction. He is a recovering alcoholic, and he’s gone on record as saying that quitting drinking was not as difficult as quitting smoking, which he’s also done. Fortunately for him—and for us, since it means we’ve kept him for ninety years and counting—he doesn’t seem to be possessed by the same demons as Williams. He really just seems like a basically decent guy who’s really good at being funny, and there is definitely a place in the world for people like that.