Background and career
Michael Andrew Fox, CC (born June 9, 1961), known professionally as Michael J. Fox, is a Canadian and American actor and activist. His accolades include five Primetime Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, two Actor Awards, and a Grammy Award. Fox was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2026, and was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2000 and the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2002. Fox began his career as a child actor in the 1970s before becoming a film star portraying Marty McFly in the Back to the Future film trilogy (1985–1990). Fox went on to star in films such as Teen Wolf (1985), The Secret of My Success (1987), Casualties of War (1989), Doc Hollywood (1991), and The Frighteners (1996). Fox also voiced roles in the Stuart Little films (1999–2005) and Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). On television, he took leading roles as Alex P. Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties (1982–1989), Mike Flaherty in the ABC sitcom Spin City (1996–2000), and Michael Henry in the NBC sitcom The Michael J. Fox Show (2013–2014), the former two of which earned him Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He took guest roles on shows such as Boston Legal (2006), Rescue Me (2009), The Good Wife (2010–2016), Curb Your Enthusiasm (2011, 2017), Designated Survivor (2018), The Good Fight (2020), and Shrinking (2026). In 1998, Fox disclosed his 1991 diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD). He became an advocate for finding a cure and founded The Michael J. Fox Foundation in 2000 to help fund research. For his advocacy of a cure for Parkinson's disease, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2022, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2025, and the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award and the Lasker~Bloomberg Public Service Award in 2026.
Michael Andrew Fox was born on June 9, 1961, in Edmonton, Alberta. His mother, Phyllis Evelyn (née Piper), was a payroll clerk and actress, while his father, William Nelson "Bill" Fox, served as a regular soldier in the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. The fifth of six children, Fox has three sisters and two brothers. Phyllis's father was an English emigrant, and her mother was an emigrant from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Bill's mother was born in Alberta to American parents, and his father was an English emigrant. The Fox family lived in various cities and towns across Canada due to Bill's career. Bill served in the army for 25 years, retiring in 1971. The same year, the family moved to Burnaby, British Columbia. From the following year to 1985, Bill worked as a dispatcher for the Delta Police Department. Fox attended Burnaby Central Secondary School and has a theatre named for him at Burnaby South Secondary School. At the age of 16, he starred in the Canadian television series Leo and Me, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1979, Fox moved to Los Angeles, California, to further his acting career. Fox was discovered by producer Ronald Shedlo and made his American debut in the television film Letters from Frank, credited under the name "Michael Fox". However, when he registered with the Screen Actors Guild, he discovered that Michael Fox, a veteran actor, was already registered under that name. Fox explained in his memoir Lucky Man:
The Screen Actors Guild prohibits any two members from working under the same stage name, and they already had a 'Michael Fox' on the books. My middle name is Andrew, but 'Andrew Fox' or 'Andy Fox' didn't cut it for me. 'Michael A. Fox' was even worse, the word fox having recently come into use as a synonym for attractive. (Presumptuous?) It also sounded uncomfortably Canadian – Michael Eh? Fox – but maybe I was just being oversensitive. And then I remembered one of my favorite character actors, Michael J. Pollard, the guileless accomplice in Bonnie and Clyde. I stuck in the J, which sometimes I tell people stands for either Jenuine or Jenius, and resubmitted my forms.
Fox's first feature film roles were Midnight Madness (1980) and Class of 1984 (1982), credited in both as Michael Fox. Shortly afterward, he began playing "Young Republican" Alex P. Keaton in the show Family Ties, which aired on NBC for seven seasons from 1982 to 1989. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon in April 2014, Fox stated he negotiated the role at a payphone at Pioneer Chicken. He received the role only after Matthew Broderick was unavailable. Family Ties had been sold to the television network using the pitch "Hip parents, square kids", with the parents originally intended to be the main characters. However, the positive reaction to Fox's performance led to his character becoming the focus of the show following the fourth episode. Brandon Tartikoff, one of the show's producers, felt that Fox was too short in relation 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." After his later successes, Fox presented Tartikoff with a custom-made lunchbox with the inscription "To Brandon: This is for you to put your crow in. Love and Kisses, Michael J." Tartikoff kept the lunchbox in his office for the rest of his NBC career.
In January 1985, Fox was cast to replace Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, a teenager who is accidentally sent back in time from 1985 to 1955 in Back to the Future. Director Robert Zemeckis originally wanted Fox to play Marty, but Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Family Ties, on which Fox was working at the time, refused to allow Zemeckis even to approach Fox. Goldberg felt that, as Meredith Baxter was on maternity leave at the time, Fox's character Alex Keaton was needed to carry the show in her absence. Stoltz was cast and was already filming Back to the Future, but Zemeckis felt that Stoltz was not giving the right type of performance for the humour involved. Zemeckis quickly replaced Stoltz with Fox, whose schedule was now more open with the return of Baxter. During filming, Fox rehearsed for Family Ties from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; he then rushed to the Back to the Future set, where he would rehearse and shoot until 2:30 a.m. This schedule lasted for two full months. Back to the Future was both a critical and commercial success. The film spent eight consecutive weekends as the number-one movie at the US box office in 1985, and it eventually earned a worldwide total of $381.11 million. Variety applauded the performances, opining that Fox and his co-star Christopher Lloyd imbued Marty and Doc Brown's friendship with a quality reminiscent of King Arthur and Merlin. Fox's performance in particular was praised, earning him a nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the 43rd Golden Globe Awards. The film was followed by two successful sequels, Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Back to the Future Part III (1990), which were produced at the same time but released separately. While filming the scene where Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen tries to hang Marty in Part III, Fox was allowed to perform the stunt himself as long as he knew where to put his hand on the noose to keep himself from choking; however, on the third take, Fox accidentally placed his hand in the wrong spot, which resulted in him choking, passing out, and nearly dying until Zemeckis noticed him in peril and had him cut down.
As a result of working on Family Ties and his back-to-back hit performances in Back to the Future and Teen Wolf (1985), Fox became a teen idol. The VH1 television series The Greatest later named him among their "50 Greatest Teen Idols". During and immediately after the Back to the Future trilogy, Fox starred in Teen Wolf (1985), Light of Day (1987), The Secret of My Success (1987), and Bright Lights, Big City (1988). In The Secret of My Success, Fox played a recent graduate from Kansas State University who moves to New York City, where he deals with the ups and downs of the business world. The film was successful at the box office, grossing $110 million worldwide. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "Fox provides a fairly desperate center for the film. It could not have been much fun for him to follow the movie's arbitrary shifts of mood, from sitcom to slapstick, from sex farce to boardroom brawls." In Bright Lights, Big City, Fox played a fact-checker for a New York magazine who spends his nights partying with alcohol and drugs. The film received mixed reviews, with Hal Hinson in The Washington Post criticizing Fox by claiming that "he was the wrong actor for the job". Meanwhile, Roger Ebert praised the actor's performance: "Fox is very good in the central role (he has a long drunken monologue that is the best thing he has ever done in a movie)". During the shooting of Bright Lights, Big City, Fox co-starred again with Tracy Pollan, his on-screen girlfriend from Family Ties. Fox won three Emmy Awards for Family Ties in 1986, 1987, and 1988. He won a Golden Globe Award in 1989, the year the show ended. When Fox left the television series Spin City in 2000, his final episodes made numerous allusions to Family Ties: Michael Gross (who played Alex's father Steven) portrays Mike Flaherty's (Fox's character's) therapist, and there is a reference to an off-screen character named "Mallory". Also, when Flaherty becomes an environmental lobbyist in Washington, D.C., he meets a conservative senator from Ohio named Alex P. Keaton, and in one episode Meredith Baxter played Mike's mother. Fox then starred in Casualties of War (1989), a dark and violent war drama about the Vietnam War, alongside Sean Penn. Casualties of War was not a major box office hit, but Fox was praised for his performance. Don Willmott wrote: "Fox, only one year beyond his Family Ties sitcom silliness, rises to the challenges of acting as the film's moral voice and sharing scenes with the always intimidating Penn." While Family Ties was ending, his production company Snowback Productions set up a two-year production pact at Paramount Pictures to develop film and television projects.
