Arlene Silver on 46-Year Age Gap with Husband Dick Van Dyke: 'Love Is Ageless'
Arlene Silver and Dick Van Dyke
Age is just a number for Dick Van Dyke and his wife Arlene Silver, who are coming up on nearly seven years of wedded bliss.
Van Dyke, 98, and Silver, 52, married in February 2012, which Van Dyke called “one of the smartest moves I ever made.”
“She’s very mature for her age and I’m very immature for my age so it’s just about right!” he told Parade in 2013.
The legendary actor isn’t shy about professing his love for his wife, and in an interview published that year in The Huffington Post, Silver opened up about her take on their “fairytale” romance.
“I haven't been married before so it's wonderful. He's the perfect human being but he's also the perfect partner,” she said. “I went through a lot of frogs to get my prince.”
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She says she first met Van Dyke when she was working as a makeup artist at the SAG awards eight years earlier.
“I remember seeing Dick at the catering table with his bow tie and his big smile,” she recalled. “Right when I sat down, he was sitting next to me. He said, 'Hi, I'm Dick.' The first thing I asked him was, 'Weren't you in Mary Poppins?'”
She said while they became friends fairly quickly, their romantic relationship evolved more gradually.
“I didn't really realize how powerful the relationship was becoming,” she said. “I would come over but I didn't want to bother him I guess. He gets so many people around him I didn't want to be intrusive, so I would just say I'll come over after work and we'll have dinner, and it turns out he was looking forward to it the whole day.”
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She recalled the first moment she saw him as something more than a friend:
“When we were working together on a movie, there was one time when we were doing a night shoot... and he was laughing like he always does, but it was the way he was lit or something—he had on a sweater and I thought, 'Wait a minute!' I just felt a little different.”
Addressing their 46-year age difference, Silver said it hasn’t been an obstacle in their relationship, and said her husband is definitely still young at heart.
“He is a lot of fun. He's not immature in a bad way. He's immature in a good way with the wonder of a child,” she said. “He's just fun, he's open minded. He's not stuck in his ways at all. We're both like children. We feel like we're both having a second childhood.”
She also revealed in the interview that she and Van Dyke were working on a show about their marriage and home life, though no news has been reported on it since. She shared that it’s not quite a reality show, but that they sometimes allow camera crews to film them at home. “It originally revolved around Dick's life but then I'm so much a part of his life it seems like it's becoming sort of a portrait of an unusual relationship and how well it works... just that love is ageless,” she said.
At the time only two years into their marriage, it sounded like their love was only growing stronger. “It's an absolute fairytale!! It's like a modern day My Fair Lady. Every day, we still don't believe that this is our life,” she said. “Dick is definitely my prince!”