SAG Awards 2013: Alec Baldwin honors Dick Van Dyke

The Screen Actors Guild Awards may not always honor the stars that you were rooting for, they do have quite a knack for picking the perfect people for their Lifetime Achievement Awards. It was a few years ago in which Betty White ended up winning this award, and her rapport with Sandra Bullock coupled with an incredible speech helped to vault her to the level of success that she has maintained over the course of the past several years.

So on Sunday night, the show branched out and chose to honor a different sort of living legend: Dick Van Dyke. The comedy icon was presented with an award courtesy of Alec Baldwin, a SAG Award winner many times over who was also thoroughly indebted to the man’s work, and also a man who he admitted taught him very much about the art form.

So is Van Dyke likely to return to television a la Betty? We wouldn’t quite count on that at the moment, since he has been more or less retired for several years now, whereas White was still working semi-regularly when Bullock presented her with an award. The last major show for Van Dyke to headline was “Diagnosis Murder,” which actually is his longest-running program over the course of his career.

Before the actor came on stage and delivered a truly gracious speech, we had an opportunity to check out some of the highlights from his career. This included of course “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “Mary Poppins,” and also some of his earlier gigs. Van Dyke was largely funny as he spoke to the crowd, though he did make one error (albeit a funny one) in referring to Baldwin as Tony Bennett.

Do you think that this was a lovely TV moment? If you want to see the full winners’ list for the show, you can do so here.

Photo: TNT