Michael J. Fox

Michael J. Fox

The Canadian-American actor, author and producer is famous for his role in the Back to the Future trilogy and several other movies and series. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 and has since become an advocate for research toward finding a cure.

Michael Andrew Fox was born June 9, 1961 in Edmonton, Canada. His father was an army officer, his mother an actress and payroll clerk. After lots of moves in his childhood, the family finally settled in Vancouver. He started acting at the age of 15 in a Canadian TV series (Leo and Me), then moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18 to further his acting career. After being discovered, he debuted in the TV film Letters from Frank. He changed his screen name to Michael J. Fox as a homage to actor Michael J. Pollard.

His first two feature films were Midnight Madness (1980) and Class of 1984 (1982). The highly successful show Family Ties was his next project; the series ran for seven seasons. Fox won three Emmy awards and a Golden Globe for his role as Alex P. Keaton. In 1985 Fox was cast as Marty McFly, a teenager sent back in time to 1955, in Back to the Future. A huge success, the film was followed by two sequels, Back to the Future Part II in 1989 and Part III in 1990. After the trilogy, Fox starred in Teen Wolf (1985), Light of Day (1987), The Secret of My Success (1987), Bright Lights, Big City (1988) and Casualties of War (1989).

Doc Hollywood, a romantic comedy came out in 1991. In this movie Fox plays a young doctor who causes a traffic accident in a small southern town and is sentenced to work for a time at the town hospital – instead of going to Hollywood to become a plastic surgeon. The nineties brought a number of movies for him, such as For Love or Money, Life with Mikey (both 1993), Greedy (1994) and Mars Attacks! (1996). His last major film role at that time was in The Frighteners (1996) directed by Peter Jackson as an architect who developed psychic abilities.

Fox lent his voice to animated characters in Atlantis and the Stuart Little movies, among others. Michael J. Fox appeared mainly in TV series in his later career. Spin City ran from 1996-2002, in which he played the role of the Deputy Mayor of New York. After announcing his illness and leaving the show to spend more time with his family, he guest-starred in Scrubs, Boston Legal and earned an Emmy for being a guest actor on Rescue Me. He also had a recurring role in The Good Wife opposite Julianna Margulies. In the series he played crafty and cold-hearted attorney Louis Canning magnificently and earned Emmy nominations in three consecutive years. The Michael J. Fox Show, a series loosely based on his life premiered in 2013 and lasted for one season.

Fox married actress Tracy Pollan in 1988. They have four children, Sam, Aquinnah and Schuyler (twin girls), and Esmé. He started showing symptoms of early-onset Parkinson’s in 1991 while shooting Doc Hollywood. He went public with his condition in 1998 and created The Michael J. Fox Foundation to help research. He wrote two books on his life and condition, Lucky Man and Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. In a 2014 interview he shared the life lesson he learned: “Look at the choices you have, not at the choices that have been taken away from you. In them, there are whole worlds of strength and new ways to look at things.”