• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 5 hours ago

Dick Van Dyke is an American master who is about to turn 100.

He has long been qualified to be called a “master” based on his mastery of all facets of entertainment.

But he has never been the subject of PBS’s “American Masters” series until now. Hey, PBS, what took you so long? 

“American Masters: Starring Dick Van Dyke” airs on Friday, December 12, the day before his 100th birthday.

What is Dick Van Dyke’s longevity secret? “I didn’t expect to get past 80,” he told Al Roker in an interview last month on “The Today Show” (photo above). “The fun thing is, I don’t know what I did, right? I have no idea.”

All Dick Van Dyke stories list his most famous credits, although he is the rare personality who is so well-known that such an inventory seems unnecessary -- at least to those of us who were alive in what you might call the Dick Van Dyke era.

So here they are anyway. The famous titles include the Broadway musical “Bye Bye Birdie” (for which he won a Tony in 1961), the movie version of the musical (which we happened to catch Monday night on one of the movie channels), the movies “Mary Poppins,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “Dick Tracy,” and on TV, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Diagnosis: Murder” -- plus a hundred other appearances in TV shows and movies for 70 years.

He has won multiple Emmy Awards, a Grammy and a Tony. He published a new book just last month, Dick Van Dyke: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life, 100 Rules for Living to 100.

Despite what he told Al Roker about not really understanding how he has lived so long, Van Dyke nevertheless has a few theories.

“I’ve decided people are born with a certain personality and a certain outlook, a certain perspective,” he told Roker. “I tend to look on the good side of things.”

“I think keep moving,” he suggested, adding that he and his wife, Arlene, 54, like to sing and dance, and then post their performances on Instagram. “She keeps me young because we sing and we dance, and she keeps me a teenager.”

In his book, he also theorizes on his long life. “I’ve made it to one hundred, in no small part, because I have stubbornly refused to give in to the bad stuff in life: failures and defeats, personal losses, loneliness and bitterness, the physical and emotional pains of aging,” he writes.

“That stuff is real, but I have not let it define me,” he continues, “because, as I see it, to do that would be to throw in the towel on life itself.”

Photo credit: Tracy Nguyen for “Today.”