Dick Van Dyke thinks that age is indeed just a number.
The actor, who is just a few months shy of his 100th birthday, opened up about how well his marriage with his wife, makeup artist Arlene Silver, works ― despite their expansive age gap.
“We get along so well,” Van Dyke, 99, said in a new interview with People magazine published Monday. Silver, 53, added that the two “just care about each other so much.”
“Everybody said it wouldn’t work,” the actor shared.
“I mean it’s like eerie how well it works,” Silver said. “People the same age don’t last.”
Van Dyke and Silver first met at the 2006 SAG Awards. The “Mary Poppins” actor said he was so struck by Silver’s presence, he decided to make the first move.
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“I never approached a strange woman in my life,” Van Dyke said in an interview with “Entertainment Tonight” last year. “And she walked by and I jumped and I said, ‘Hi, I’m Dick.’ I had no idea she was half my age. Beautiful.”
The two’s nearly five-decade age gap didn’t matter to the Emmy winner, who joked that he “was fortunate that I didn’t grow up!”
Their relationship also came so naturally that Silver and Van Dyke said the people closest to them were happy when they officially got together.
“We were friends for so long that when I told people that I know, they were happy about [our relationship], and I was scared,” Silver told “ET.” “I mean, the facts, our age difference. But it’s so irrelevant. I think when you see us together, it’s like you don’t even think about it.”
The two married in 2012, when Van Dyke was 86 and Silver was 40. Van Dyke called married life “unbelievable” with Silver in an interview around the two’s one-year wedding anniversary.
“It’s one of the smartest moves I ever made. She makes me happy,” he told Parade in 2013. “She’s very mature for her age, and I’m very immature for my age, so it’s just about right!”
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