Life is not a bed of roses for Michael J. Fox.
The loving actor has been fighting Parkinson’s disease for many years now, and the fight with the disease of Parkinson’s is not easy.
But you know that the early life of Michael J. Fox was very difficult, and he accepted great challenges when he tried to break through in Hollywood.
No doubt Michael J. Fox has a successful career, even though his Parkinson’s disease negatively impacted him.
One noticeable thing is that Michael J. Fox’s upbringing was pretty unusual. He was born on June 9, 1961, in Edmonton, Canada. His father worked in the Canadian Armed Forces that’s why the family moved around a lot.
His mother was a payroll clerk that’s why she has a steady job but Michael was raised in a blue-collar family. When the family settled in Burnaby, British Columbia, Michael J. Fox found his zeal for acting in junior high.
Michael entered the drama division at school and his apparent there was evidence of his love for acting.
According to his website his theater teacher motivated him to audition for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series, Leo & Me, and Fox got the part.
He performed many roles on TV, and at the same time, acted in the local theater in Vancouver. Michael J. Fox had decided that acting was his pursuit of life at that point. At the age of 17, he packed his bags to chase an acting career in Los Angeles.
“I knew that if I wanted to be someone, I couldn’t just sit on my parents’ porch and think, ‘Boy, if I was only born in the States and my parents had money and weren’t living paycheck to paycheck, I could do something with my life,’” he said.
His parents always supported him in his significant dreams, and Fox dropped out of high school. His father even convinced him all the way to Los Angeles.
Speaking on LIVE with Kelly and Mark recently, Fox said he still doesn’t know how he convinced his father to do it.
“I told him that I wanted to go to Los Angeles, I knew I wanted to go to the United States, I knew I wanted to be an actor. My father, I know, thought I was a hippie. He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘If you want to be a lumberjack, you might as well go to the forest.’ So he got me in the car and drove me to California,” Michael J. Fox recalled.
Doing something unique in a glamorous world was not as easy as pie. Michael didn’t have the very easy or best starting point. He came from a blue-collar family and he didn’t have much money on his name.
“I was living on the margins. I was 18 years old, with no money, no connections, literally dumpster diving for food,” he told Variety in 2023.
Finally, his dream became true to be an actor, and after some years he was cast in one of his most significant roles. He was cast as Alex P. Keaton on the comedy series Family Ties, which became one of the biggest comedy series on television.
After some time, he performed in other parts, with his iconic role as Marty McFly in Back to the Future.
In 2022 he opened up that his mother was not in favour of the role of Marty McFly in Back to the Future.
But he went on and after some time he realized that his mother might have been right.
He said, “I live for this kind of tired. It’ll be okay,” he had said to his mom, “To this day — well, till two weeks ago — my mother thought it was a really bad idea for me to do Back to the Future. She loved the movie, [but she was right], I got tired.”
He met Tracy Pollan on the set of Family Ties. According to some rumors they were cast as each other’s love interest on the show. But after some time they met again and fell in love with each other.
Michael J. Fox already had a crush on Tracy while working on Family Ties.
“I developed a crush on her right away. When she left the show – the day she left the show, we were in the parking lot getting into our respective cars. She was getting into a rented Volkswagen, and I was getting into my Ferrari. And she called me over and said she wanted to play me a song. She played me a James Taylor song called That’s Why I’m Here, which was ostensibly about John Belushi. And one of the lines was, ‘John’s gone, found dead, died high. He’s brown bread, later said to have drowned in his bed. After the laughter, the wave of dread hits us like a ton of lead. That’s why we’re here,’” Fox recalled in an interview with NPR.
Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan got married in 1988. They have 4 kids Sam Michael Fox (born in 1989), twins Schuyler Frances and Aquinnah Kathleen (1995), and Esmé Annabelle (2001).
One thing that is very interesting about the name of Michael J. Fox is that Michael Fox didn’t have ” J” initially.
Once in the limelight, he tried to enter the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the labor union for film and television workers worldwide. But when he applied, he found another person with the same name Michael Fox, so he added ”J” middle initial to his name, choosing “J” as a tribute to his dearest actor, Michael J. Pollard.
He retired from acting in 2020, officially. when his age was 60 and having just been selected as Louis Canning in CBS’s legal drama “The Good Fight”, a spin-off to “The Good Wife” where his character first appeared.
“I reached the point where I couldn’t rely on my ability to speak on any given day, which meant I couldn’t act comfortably at all anymore. So, last year I gave it up,” he said of his decision to retire, as per Good Morning America.
When Fox first diagnosed Parkinson’s disease he started drinking heavily. But after some time he stopped, searched for help, and was courageous enough to disclose his condition in 1998. Since then he has been a strong advocate and inspiration to those battling with the disease.
No doubt, Michael J. Fox is a courageous man and he fought alone on many ups and downs of life.