Michael J. Fox

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael J. Fox once worked two months of days that began with rehearsals at 10 a.m. and ended with filming at 2:30 the next morning. Those were the hours of 1985. By day he rehearsed the sitcom Family Ties. By night he rushed to the set of Back to the Future. The schedule was only a preview of what he would be asked to carry. This documentary follows a boy from western Canada who became one of the most recognizable faces on American screens. It asks how a young actor from Edmonton ended up there. It asks why the name on the credits was not quite the name he was born with. And it asks what he chose to do when his own body began to change the terms of his career.

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• 2. A Borrowed Initial

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  Edmonton, Alberta, is where Michael Andrew Fox was born on the 9th of June 1961, the fifth of six children. His parents met in Ladner, British Columbia. His mother, Phyllis, was working for a local newspaper called The Ladner Optimist, and his father, Bill, was serving at the nearby Vancouver Wireless Station. Bill was a regular soldier in the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals, so the family moved through various Canadian cities and towns. He served 25 years and retired in 1971. That year the family settled in Burnaby, British Columbia, and Bill later worked as a dispatcher for the Delta Police Department. Fox attended Burnaby Central Secondary School, and a theatre at Burnaby South Secondary School now bears his name.

  At the age of 16, Fox starred in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series Leo and Me. In 1979 he moved to Los Angeles to push his acting career forward. There the producer Ronald Shedlo discovered him, and he made his American debut in the television film Letters from Frank. He was credited as Michael Fox. Then he tried to register with the Screen Actors Guild and hit a wall. In his memoir Lucky Man, he explained: "The Screen Actors Guild prohibits any two members from working under the same stage name." A veteran actor named Michael Fox was already on the books.

  Fox ran through the alternatives. Andrew Fox and Andy Fox did not appeal to him. Michael A. Fox sounded worse, partly because the word fox had recently become slang for attractive, and partly because it sounded, in his words, uncomfortably Canadian. Then he remembered one of his favorite character actors, Michael J. Pollard, the guileless accomplice in Bonnie and Clyde. Fox wrote: "I stuck in the J, which sometimes I tell people stands for either Jenuine or Jenius." His first two feature films, Midnight Madness in 1980 and Class of 1984 in 1982, still credited him as Michael Fox.

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• 3. Alex P. Keaton

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  By his own account to Jimmy Fallon in April 2014, Fox negotiated the part of Alex P. Keaton at a payphone at Pioneer Chicken. He landed the role only because Matthew Broderick was unavailable. Family Ties had been sold to NBC with the pitch "Hip parents, square kids," and the parents were meant to be the main characters. Alex was written as a "Young Republican." Audiences responded so warmly to Fox that, after the fourth episode, his character became the center of the show. The series aired for seven seasons, from 1982 to 1989.

  Not everyone at the network shared the enthusiasm. Brandon Tartikoff, one of the show's producers, felt Fox was too short next to the actors playing his parents and tried to have him replaced. Tartikoff reportedly said, "This is not the kind of face you'll ever find on a lunchbox." Years later, after Fox's other successes, the actor sent him a custom-made lunchbox. The inscription read: "To Brandon: This is for you to put your crow in. Love and Kisses, Michael J." Tartikoff kept it in his office for the rest of his NBC career.

  The awards followed. Fox won an Emmy for Family Ties in each year from 1986 to 1988, and a Golden Globe in 1989, the year the show ended. The series also gave him something no trophy could. Tracy Pollan played his girlfriend Ellen on the show. She and Fox married on the 16th of July 1988 at West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont, and they have four children: one son and three daughters.

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• 4. Marty McFly

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  In January 1985, Fox was cast to replace Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, a teenager accidentally sent from 1985 back to 1955 in Back to the Future. Director Robert Zemeckis had wanted Fox from the beginning. But Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Family Ties, would not even let Zemeckis approach him. Meredith Baxter was on maternity leave, and Goldberg needed Alex Keaton to carry the show. So Stoltz was cast and began filming. Zemeckis then decided that Stoltz was not giving the right kind of performance for the humour the film required. With Baxter back at work, Fox's schedule opened up, and Zemeckis quickly made the switch.

  The gamble paid off. Back to the Future spent eight consecutive weekends as the number-one movie at the US box office in 1985, and it eventually earned $381.11 million worldwide. Variety applauded the cast and said Fox and his co-star Christopher Lloyd gave the friendship of Marty and Doc Brown a quality reminiscent of King Arthur and Merlin. Fox's performance earned a nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy at the 43rd Golden Globe Awards. Together with Family Ties and Teen Wolf, also from 1985, the film made him a teen idol. The VH1 series The Greatest later named him among its "50 Greatest Teen Idols."

  Two sequels followed. Back to the Future Part II arrived in 1989 and Part III in 1990, shot at the same time but released separately. During Part III, Fox was allowed to do the stunt in which the outlaw Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen tries to hang Marty, as long as he knew where to put his hand on the noose. On the third take he placed his hand in the wrong spot. He choked, passed out and nearly died before Zemeckis noticed the danger and had him cut down.

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• 5. Chasing Range

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  Teen Wolf in 1985 was only the first of several leading roles that crowded the late 1980s. Light of Day and The Secret of My Success came in 1987. In The Secret of My Success, Fox played a recent Kansas State University graduate who moves to New York City and faces the ups and downs of the business world. The film grossed $110 million worldwide. Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that Fox provided "a fairly desperate center for the film," given its arbitrary shifts of mood.

  Bright Lights, Big City in 1988 pushed him somewhere darker. He played a fact-checker for a New York magazine who spends his nights on alcohol and drugs. Critics split. Hal Hinson of The Washington Post wrote that Fox "was the wrong actor for the job," while Ebert called him very good and singled out a long drunken monologue as the best thing he had done in a movie. Tracy Pollan, his on-screen girlfriend from Family Ties, co-starred again.

  Casualties of War in 1989 went further still. It was a dark and violent drama about the Vietnam War, and Fox shared scenes with Sean Penn. The film was not a major box office hit, but Fox was praised. Don Willmott wrote that he rose to the challenge of acting as the film's moral voice. As Family Ties wound down, his production company, Snowback Productions, set up a two-year deal with Paramount Pictures to develop film and television projects.

  In 1991 came Doc Hollywood, in which he played a talented doctor who winds up in a small town in South Carolina, and The Hard Way, in which he played an undercover actor learning from police officer James Woods. He also lent his voice to the American Bulldog Chance in Disney's Homeward Bound films, to the title mouse in the Stuart Little films, and to Milo James Thatch in Atlantis: The Lost Empire. His last major film role was Frank Bannister in The Frighteners, directed by Peter Jackson, in 1996.

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• 6. Ten Good Years

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  A sore shoulder and a twitching little finger appeared in early 1991, while Fox was shooting Doc Hollywood. Later that year, at the age of 30, he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson's disease. He was told he had "ten good working years left," and that within a few years he might not be able to work at all. He hastily signed a three-film contract. It produced For Love or Money and Life with Mikey in 1993, and Greedy in 1994. He kept the diagnosis private.

  Privately, things were harder. After the diagnosis, Fox began drinking heavily and sank into depression. In 1992 he sought help and stopped drinking altogether. In Lucky Man, he describes seven years of denial before he turned toward advocacy. He went public in 1998, and that same year he had a thalamotomy, a surgical procedure for the condition.

  In 1999 he testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, and he made a deliberate choice about how to appear. He wrote in Lucky Man: "I had made a deliberate choice to appear before the subcommittee without medication." He wanted the effects of the disease and the urgency of the community to be seen as well as heard. He manages his symptoms with the drug carbidopa/levodopa. In a 2002 NPR interview he explained that the weaving motion people see in some interviews is dyskinesia, a reaction to the medication. He said he would rather accept that than the pure symptoms of Parkinson's, which can clutter his speech and make sitting still difficult.

  The cause of Parkinson's disease is not well understood and may involve genetic and environmental factors. Fox is one of at least four members of the cast and crew of Leo and Me who developed early-onset Parkinson's. He says that is too few people to count as a cluster, so it has not been well researched. In 2020 he told Hadley Freeman of The Guardian that he could imagine a thousand scenarios, from fishing near paper mills to farms. His conclusion: "You can drive yourself crazy trying to figure it out."

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• 7. The Foundation

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  In 2006, Fox starred in a campaign ad for Claire McCaskill, then State Auditor of Missouri, in her Senate race against the incumbent Jim Talent. He let the cameras show the effects of his Parkinson's disease. He said in the ad: "Unfortunately, Senator Jim Talent opposes expanding stem cell research." He added: "What you do in Missouri matters to millions of Americans, Americans like me." The New York Times called it "one of the most powerful and talked about political advertisements in years." Polls indicated it had a measurable effect on how voters voted, and McCaskill won.

  The ad grew from a larger project. In 2000 Fox founded The Michael J. Fox Foundation, created to help advance every promising research path toward a cure for Parkinson's. Since 2010 he has led a $100-million effort, the Foundation's landmark observational study, to find the biological markers of the disease. It is called the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative. In 2016 the organization held a raffle that raised $6.75 million, with help from Nike through two auctions, one in Hong Kong and one in London.

  Fox also wrote about the work. His second book, Always Looking Up, covers his life from 1999 to 2009, with much of it centered on his stem cell campaigning. On the 31st of March 2009 he discussed the book and his condition on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Mehmet Oz. A third book, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future, followed in 2010. Time magazine named him in 2007 among 100 people "whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world." On the 5th of March 2010 the Karolinska Institute gave him an honorary doctorate in medicine.

  Honours piled up from his home country as well. Canada's Walk of Fame inducted him in 2000, and he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010. The Hollywood Walk of Fame followed in 2002. At the 2022 Governors Awards, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for fighting Parkinson's, having raised over $1 billion for research. His friend Woody Harrelson presented it. In 2025 came the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented by President Joe Biden.

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• 8. Spin City and After

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  Spin City premiered on ABC in 1996, with Fox as Mike Flaherty, the deputy mayor of a fictional New York City government. He served as an executive producer alongside co-creators Bill Lawrence and Gary David Goldberg. The show won him an Emmy Award in 2000, Golden Globes in 1998-1999 and 2000, and Screen Actors Guild Awards in 1999 and 2000. During the third season he told the cast and crew about his Parkinson's disease. In the fourth season he announced his retirement from the show. Charlie Sheen's character replaced his, and Fox made three more appearances in the final season.

  His farewell winked at his old life. Michael Gross, who played Alex's father on Family Ties, appeared as Mike Flaherty's therapist. A character named Mallory was mentioned. Flaherty became an environmental lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and met a conservative senator from Ohio named Alex P. Keaton. Meredith Baxter even played Mike's mother in one episode.

  Guest roles kept him working. In 2004 he played Dr. Kevin Casey, a surgeon with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, in two episodes of Scrubs. In 2009 he won an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for Rescue Me. From 2010 he played the crafty attorney Louis Canning on The Good Wife and earned Emmy nominations three years in a row. In 2011 he played himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm, where Larry David accuses him of using his Parkinson's as a manipulative tool. The Michael J. Fox Show premiered in September 2013, was loosely based on his life, and was taken off the air after 15 episodes.

  On the 28th of February 2010, Fox delivered a comedy monologue at the Winter Olympics closing ceremony in Vancouver, with William Shatner and Catherine O'Hara, saying how proud he was to be Canadian. In 2020 he retired because his speech had become unreliable. In his memoir that year, No Time Like the Future, he wrote: "If this is the end of my acting career, so be it." The line before it was: "That could change, because everything changes."

  The line proved true. On the 12th of May 2023, Apple TV+ released Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, directed by Davis Guggenheim, which won four of its seven nominations at the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards. That year he told Jane Pauley on CBS Sunday Morning, "It's getting harder. Every day it's tougher." On the 29th of June 2024, he played guitar with Coldplay at Glastonbury on "Humankind" and "Fix You," and Chris Martin said Back to the Future was the main reason the band began. He returned to acting in the third season of Shrinking, and on the 14th of October 2025 he published Future Boy, co-written with Nelle Fortenberry. In Zootopia 2, he voices an incarcerated fox named "Michael J. the fox."

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