Michael J. Fox

Marty McFly's Double Life

Michael Andrew Fox had to invent a middle initial to join the Screen Actors Guild in the United States. He chose the J as a nod to actor Michael J. Pollard, because his real name was already taken by another professional. The year was 1982, and Fox had just landed the role of Alex P. Keaton in the sitcom Family Ties, a job that pulled him out of a diet of mac and cheese and cardboard-box furniture.

Robert Zemeckis wanted him for Back to the Future, but the producer of his series refused to let him go. So the actor accepted a crazy schedule that nearly wrecked his physical health. He filmed the series from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., then got into a car to shoot the movie until 6 a.m. the next day. He slept barely three hours on the drive between one set and the next.

That bet paid off.

The 1985 film was the highest-grossing movie of the year, earning 380 million dollars worldwide. Fox went from a supporting TV actor to the most recognizable face on the planet in less than six months. But while audiences saw an eternal teenager traveling through time, the actor was struggling to come to terms with a fame that felt suffocating.

In 1989, while filming Iron Hearts in Thailand, he began to notice that something was wrong. Brian De Palma demanded a physical intensity that Fox met with great effort, but a slight tremor in the pinky finger of his left hand alerted him. Doctors took months to give him a clear answer.

The Secret Kept in a Trailer

In 1991, he received a definitive diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson's. He was only 29 years old and had just married actress Tracy Pollan. Neurologists told him he had barely ten years of full working capacity left before his symptoms became obvious to the cameras. Fox decided to keep it hidden from the industry and the public so he could keep working without pity ruining his contracts.

And then everything changed.

For seven years he made movies like The American President and starred in the series Spin City, constantly hiding his left hand in his pockets or holding objects to disguise the tremors. Alcohol became a temporary refuge until he decided to seek help and focus on his family. In 1998, he revealed his illness to the world in an interview with People magazine.

The news did not slow his work, but it transformed it. In 2000 he founded the Michael J. Fox Foundation with a purely scientific goal. He did not want his organization to be an emotional support group but a drug accelerator that would pursue a real cure by investing in biotechnology. He understood that money was the only tool capable of moving the will of the laboratories.

His return to television with complex characters was a lesson in acting technique. In 2010, he appeared in The Good Wife as Louis Canning, a cynical lawyer who used his neurological disease to manipulate juries. Fox insisted the character not be a victim, because he loathed the condescension writers showed toward disability.

A Retirement Announced on Paper

In 2020, he published his memoir, titled No hay mejor momento que el futuro, in which he confirmed his permanent retirement from acting. Short-term memory problems made it impossible for him to memorize dialogue with the precision a professional shoot demanded. He could no longer hold seven pages of script in his head as he had in the eighties, so he chose to walk away before the quality of his work declined.

The foundation has raised more than $2,000 million.

In 2023, the documentary Still, directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released. In this production, the actor openly showed the frequent falls and broken bones he suffers in daily life due to loss of balance. The film details how Fox broke his arm, hand, shoulder, and cheekbone in various household accidents caused by his lack of motor control.

The research team funded by his foundation announced in April 2023 the discovery of a key biomarker. It is a protein called alpha-synuclein that makes it possible to detect the disease in living people before the first physical symptoms appear. The study was published in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology after analyzing data from 1,123 participants over several years of clinical follow-up.