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
I think there's a God and I know it's not me. I don't have a set of tenets, but I live an ethical life.
I don't think [Parkinson's] is Gothic nastiness. There's nothing on the surface that's horrible about someone with a shaky hand. There's nothing horrible about someone in their life saying, "God, I'm really tired of this shaky hand thing" and me saying, "Me, too." That's our reality. We have no control over it.
I think we all get our own bag of hammers. We all get our own Parkinson's. We all have our own thing. I think that we'll look at it through the filter of that experience, and we'll say, "Yeah, I need to laugh at my stuff, too."
My age makes me think how valuable life is. How bad is something like Parkinson's in relation to not having life at all?
I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting.
As a kid, I was into music, played guitar in a band. Then I started acting in plays in junior high school and just got lost in the puzzle of acting, the magic of it. I think it was an escape for me.
I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.
'Why do you think it is...', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.'
If you asked my kids to describe me, they'd go through a whole list of words before even thinking about Parkinson's. And honestly, I don't think about it that much either. I talk about it because it's there, but it's not my totality.
I think there's a god and I know it's not me.
There's a connection that's hard to explain. It's the feeling I get when I see someone shuffle up to meet me, or say something, and I can instantly tell by the cant of their head or by the movement of their arms -- and these are people who aren't even full-blown symptomatic -- that they're one of us. And the look they give me, it's not just gratitude -- I don't care about the gratitude -- but solidarity. And shared optimism. And a resiliency that just makes me think we're doing the right thing, and that this truly is a community.
You know what's cool? My kids think I'm ordinary.
Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be--right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once).
With Parkinson's, it's like you're in the middle of the street and you're stuck there in cement shoes and you know a bus is coming at you, but you don't know when. You think you can hear it rumbling, but you have a lot of time to think. And so you just don't live that moment of the bus hitting you until it happens. There's all kinds of room in that space.