For 38 years, Tracy Pollan has been known first as Mrs. Michael J. Fox. The couple met on the set of Family Ties in 1985 and married in the summer of 1988. Together they raised four children through his Parkinson’s diagnosis and beyond. Fans who remember her as Alex P. Keaton’s girlfriend Ellen tend to assume the TV romance turned real right away.
It didn’t. When Pollan first walked onto that NBC set, she was already in a serious, live-in relationship with another rising star of the decade. His name would soon be on movie posters across America. The full story of who he was, and how Michael J. Fox ended up with the girl, starts on Long Island.
How Did a Long Island Girl Become an Actress?
Tracy Jo Pollan was born on June 22, 1960, on Long Island, New York, which makes her 66 today. She grew up in Woodbury with her parents, Stephen and Corky Pollan, as one of four children. Her older brother is Michael Pollan, the bestselling food writer behind The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the famous rule “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
She attended Syosset High School and later the Dalton School in Manhattan. From there she trained at the HB Studio and the Lee Strasberg Institute, two of New York’s best-known acting schools.
Her first screen credit came in For Lovers Only, a 1982 ABC television movie. TCM describes it as a comedy pilot set at a honeymoon resort in the Poconos. Andy Griffith, Deborah Raffin, and Sally Kellerman were in the cast. A year later, she made her feature film debut as Leslie in Baby It’s You (1983).
By 1985 she was working on stage in Pack of Lies. That same year, a sitcom offered her the part that would change her life.
What Really Happened When She Played Alex P. Keaton’s Girlfriend?
In season four of Family Ties, Pollan joined the cast as Ellen Reed, an artsy college student who falls for Fox’s staunchly conservative Alex. She appeared in 15 episodes before leaving to pursue other roles, according to The List and Wikipedia.
On screen, the chemistry was obvious. Off screen, both actors were spoken for. Fox was dating The Facts of Life star Nancy McKeon at the time, E! News reported. Fox later described the working relationship to People as “like a couple of married people who worked together and liked each other.”
Fox has said he fell for her early on, and he has told the story himself. In his 2023 Apple TV+ documentary Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, he recalled teasing her at lunch with the line “Whoa, a little scampi for lunch, babe?” According to ET and Fox News, she shot back without changing her expression that he was a “complete and total” expletive. “In that moment I fell in love with her,” Fox said. Nobody, he explained, had ever talked to him like that.
But the timing was wrong. Pollan finished her year on the show and went home to New York, and to the man she had been living with for years.
How Did ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ Bring Them Back Together?
In 1987, Fox and Pollan were both cast in Bright Lights, Big City, the film adaptation of Jay McInerney’s novel about a young writer adrift in Manhattan. She played Vicky Allagash, the sister of the party boy played by Kiefer Sutherland. Phoebe Cates rounded out the cast. This time, both leads were single.
Fox did not waste any time. He told People in 1989 that the moment went something like this: “Someone goes, ‘Did you hear that so and so aren’t together anymore?’ and you go, ‘Hmm, that’s too bad. Where’s the phone?'” Hello! magazine confirmed that he asked her out once he learned she was available.
They dated for about seven months. Fox proposed on December 26, 1987, and later admitted, “I wasn’t really worried that she would say no,” E! News reported.
The wedding took place on July 16, 1988, at the West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont. Photographers tracked down the remote location, and helicopters circled overhead trying for aerial shots. Fox remembered it fondly anyway. “It was a house party,” he said. “We rolled back the rugs and danced the night away.”
What Is the Pollan and Fox Family Like Today?
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The couple’s first child, Sam, was born on May 30, 1989. Twin daughters Aquinnah and Schuyler followed on February 15, 1995. Fox told Good Housekeeping in 2011 that they chose the 15th over the 14th so they could still go out for Valentine’s dinner. Their youngest, Esmé, was born on November 3, 2001. All four are adults now, at 37, 31, 31 and 24.
Schuyler married her longtime partner on June 22, 2024, which happened to be her mother’s 64th birthday. People reported the ceremony took place at Hayfield in the Catskill Mountains.
Pollan cut back on acting after the wedding to focus on her family, but she never fully left. She earned a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2000 for a guest role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. She has also served on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation since 2000.
Food runs in the family. In 2014, Pollan, her mother Corky and her sisters Lori and Dana published The Pollan Family Table with Scribner, featuring a foreword by Michael Pollan. The four women followed it in 2019 with Mostly Plants: 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes from the Pollan Family, a title borrowed from her brother’s famous advice.
Through all of it, she has stood beside her husband’s fight with Parkinson’s disease. Fox was diagnosed in 1991 at age 29, went public in 1998, and stepped away from acting in 2020. He returned in 2026 as Gerry, a man living with Parkinson’s, on Apple TV’s Shrinking opposite Harrison Ford.
At 65, he received the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the Emmys on September 14, 2026, with his wife and all four children there. “I thank Tracy and our kids for their sacrifices, for their patience and for their love. You have no idea,” he said in his speech, LBC reported. Weeks later, Canada named him a Companion of the Order of Canada, as we covered in our story on his latest honor.
Earlier this year, at the Actor Awards on March 1, Fox summed up what Family Ties gave him. “I met my wife, the actor Tracy Pollan, who played Ellen, my girlfriend,” he told the crowd, calling it “the greatest gift of my career,” according to People.
So Who Was the Other ’80s Star in Tracy Pollan’s Life?
The man Pollan went home to after every Family Ties taping was Kevin Bacon. The pair met in 1981 while acting in a play together, and they dated for about five years, according to Hello! magazine and E! News. During those years Bacon broke through in Diner. Then Footloose made him a full movie star in 1984.
The couple shared a Manhattan apartment and a Connecticut farmhouse. In a 1986 interview with People, Pollan was open about how serious it was. “I fly home to Kevin the second filming shuts down,” she said. She even talked about the future. “We will probably marry, but I feel like we’re kids still, and marriage is such a grown-up thing,” she said, adding, “I’m gushingly in love.”
Neither of them ever explained the breakup publicly. By 1987, though, both had moved on for good. Bacon met actress Kyra Sedgwick on the set of the PBS film Lemon Sky, and Fox was making his phone call.
What came next is a remarkable coincidence. Bacon proposed to Sedgwick on Christmas Eve 1987, according to The Knot. Fox proposed to Pollan two days later, on December 26. Both couples married in 1988, Pollan and Fox in July and Bacon and Sedgwick on September 4. Nearly four decades on, both marriages are still going, and you can see the Bacons’ own look back in this throwback photo story.
