Veteran actor Dick Van Dyke, best known for his hit television comedy of the 1960s, survived a car fire unscathed on Monday when a passerby pulled him from the smoldering vehicle before it burst into flames on the side of a Los Angeles-area freeway.
A spokesman for the California Highway Patrol confirmed that the 87-year-old performer was the driver seen slumped over the steering wheel of a Jaguar that was reported to be on fire on the shoulder of the Ventura Freeway.
Van Dyke said a group of motorists who stopped to render assistance, one of them apparently an off-duty firefighter, saw him huddled in the driver’s seat while he was trying to place a call for help and pulled him out of the car to safety. “They thought I had passed out so they yanked me out of the car,” Van Dyke recounted in an interview with the celebrity news website TMZ.com, saying he had not initially realised that his car was burning.