These Are The Oldest Hollywood Stars Alive Today

Now that we're into the 2020s, it's a sad fact that many of the stars from Hollywood's Golden Age are no longer with us. When we sit down to enjoy a classic piece of cinema on a Sunday afternoon, we tend to assume that most of the actors we're watching are already at the big wrap party in the sky, but that's not always the case. While Hollywood history is littered with tragic tales of actors who left us too soon, there's an ever-shrinking group of veterans that were alive back when the "talkies" were still a new thing in theaters. Some of these stars are quietly enjoying their retirement after a busy life in Tinseltown, though a surprisingly large number of them remain active in the industry today.

From former screen sirens that still look glamorous well into their 90s, to the actor with the one hundred year career, we've put together a rundown of the oldest living Hollywood stars.

Alfred Hitchcock made her career, but according to Tippi Hedren, the five-time Oscar nominee also ruined it. Hitchcock offered her a contract after spotting her in a commercial and they made two films (The Birds and Marnie) together, but things quickly went south when the director tried to make the relationship personal. According to Hedren, things came to a head when the jealous filmmaker attempted to kiss her against her will. "When he told me that he would ruin me, I just told him to do what he had to do," Hedren told Variety. "I went out of the door and slammed it so hard that I looked back to see if it was still on its hinges."

Hitchcock stuck to his word, keeping Hedren locked into her contract while refusing to give her any good roles. She was out of the game for three years, and when she returned, it was in a smaller, supporting role in A Countess From Hong Kong, a Charlie Chaplin-directed rom-com starring Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren. She recurred on TV shows like The Bold and the Beautiful, Dream On, Providence and Fashion House, and she would carry on appearing in the odd film, but Hedren never reached those early heights again. She did, however, oversee a Hollywood dynasty — the 96-year-old icon is the mother of Oscar nominee Melanie Griffith and the grandmother of Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson.

According to The New York Times, comedy legend Mel Brooks was born "on his mother's kitchen table in Brooklyn in 1926," just two years before his father died. As History notes, at age 17 he joined the U.S. Army and served in Europe during World War II, clearing landmines ahead of the Allied advance. He was already writing his own comedy sketches at this point, and, according to the outlet, "Brooks once used a bullhorn to serenade nearby enemy troops along the German-French border with the Al Jolson song 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie'—and received a round of applause in return." He came under the stewardship of Your Show of Shows creator Sid Caesar after returning to the States and would go on to become an EGOT; people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.

Brooks has long been known as both an actor and a filmmaker, but he's perhaps best known for his directorial endeavors, helming farcical classics like The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. He's still active today (he recently worked with Whoopi Goldberg and Jane Lynch on upcoming animated musical anthology Fairy Tale Forest), and he has the love of his life, late wife Anne Bancroft, to thank for that. "She believed in me right from the beginning, as a songwriter as well as a screenplay writer or whatever I wanted to do," Brooks told CBS News.

As 100-year-old actor Dick Van Dyke wrote in 2011's My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business, as a kid in Illinois, he "spent Saturdays in the movie theater" and "was particularly taken with Stan Laurel" of comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. As his bio on the Masterworks Broadway site recounts, he dabbled in theater before joining the U.S. Army Air Corps, where the future movie star stayed busy "announcing, singing, and dancing in variety entertainments for his fellow soldiers." Jobs in local radio and TV followed his time in the military, but it was a stage show that eventually put him on the map, the multi-Tony Award winning Bye Bye Birdie. He reprised the role of unsuccessful songwriter Albert Peterson when the show was adapted for the screen three years later.

Van Dyke cemented his stardom playing variety show writer Rob Petrie on beloved '60s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, based on writer Carl Reiner's real life experiences. He went on to star in musical fantasy classics Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, in which he adopted a widely-mocked cockney accent to play jack-of-all-trades Bert. He returned to play the surprisingly nimble Mr. Dawes, Jr. in 2019 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, despite being well into his 90s at the time. Other notable recent credits include Trollz, in which he voiced the character Yusop, and the Night at the Museum series, in which he went against type as the villainous security guard Cecil.

When Olivia de Havilland died in 2020 at the age of 104, Eva Marie Saint became the oldest living recipient of an Academy Award for acting. She landed the Best Supporting Actress statuette for her turn as Edie Doyle in crime thriller On The Waterfront, which took home a total of eight Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor for Marlon Brando. The girl from New Jersey had learned her craft at the world famous Actors Studio in New York City, which is where she got her start on the radio. She flitted between the stage and the small screen as she found her feet in the early '50s, but when On The Waterfront — her first ever feature film, would you believe — dropped in 1954, she became an overnight sensation.

The 96-year-old actor appeared in dozens of flicks over the decades, but her best known film is probably Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, in which she plays a spy who falls for Cary Grant. The way Saint tells it, Grant was as charming in real life as he was on the screen. The actress once informed Vanity Fair that one of their kissing scenes was so steamy that it made a nearby photographer fall off his ladder. "He didn't hurt himself so we can laugh about it," she said. "So then we had to do it again, which wasn't bad."