Michael J. Fox
Michael J. Fox
Michael Andrew Fox, OC, known as Michael J. Fox, is a Canadian-American actor, author, producer, and activist. With a film and television career spanning from the 1970s, Fox's roles have included Marty McFly from the Back to the Future trilogy; Alex P. Keaton from NBC's Family Ties, for which he won three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award; and Mike Flaherty in ABC's Spin City, for which he won an Emmy, three Golden Globes, and two Screen Actors Guild...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth9 June 1961
CityEdmonton, Canada
CountryCanada
By 21, I was earning six figures a week. By 23, I had a Ferrari. It was nuts.
After a year or so I really thought I was Howard Hughes. Here I was at eighteen years old, getting all these checks.
Teenagers blithely skip off to uncertain futures, while their parents sit weeping curbside in the Volvo, because the adolescent brain isn't yet formed enough to recognize and evaluate risk.
I can't be smug, because I know that you can lose anything at any point. And I can't be angry, because I haven't lost it.
In fact, Parkinson's has made me a better person. A better husband, father and overall human being.
Life delivered me a catastrophe, but I found a richness of soul.
Pity is a benign form of abuse.
I have a remarkably normal life.
I don't have any affirmations, I don't have any of that stuff. My natural state is to look at things as possibilities and as opportunities.
No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today's events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want. I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.
So I never spend a lot of time analyzing why people respond to my work. But I think that it's just the joy, a passion for life, that I think has always been in my characters. Beyond that, I'm just grateful for it.
I've learned some exciting things - mostly, that people really want to help each other; and that, if you can lay out a vision for them - and that vision is sincere and genuine - they'll get interested.
The moment I understood this - that my Parkinson's was the one thing I wasn't going to change - I started looking at the things I could change, like the way research is funded.