On a fall night in 1983, NBC aired a made-for-TV comedy called High School U.S.A., and the kid at the center of it was a 22-year-old Canadian with a quick grin who had never actually finished high school himself. Michael J. Fox played J.J. Manners, and the grown-ups around him were a who’s who of classic TV, including Bob Denver and Dawn Wells of Gilligan’s Island. Within two years that kid would be Marty McFly.
Fox turned 65 on June 9, and 2026 has turned out to be one of the busiest years he has had in a long time. He has lived with Parkinson’s disease for 35 years; he walked away from acting in 2020, and then he came back. Here is how he is doing now, in his own words, and what he has said about the woman who has been beside him through all of it.
The Dropout Who Became Alex P. Keaton
Michael Andrew Fox was born June 9, 1961, in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up mostly in Burnaby, outside Vancouver. He was acting on Canadian TV by 16, and by 17, according to his own foundation’s biography, he had left school. In 1979, at 18, he moved to Los Angeles to chase the work. He has never dressed that choice up. He later called dropping out a “stupid youthful mistake” and told his own kids they had to finish high school. Burnaby Central, the school he left, went on to name its theater after him anyway.
The early years in Los Angeles were lean. He has joked about “dumpster diving” in those days, and High School U.S.A. came along while he was already playing the role that would change everything. That was Alex P. Keaton, the tie-wearing young Republican son of two former hippies on Family Ties, which ran on NBC from 1982 to 1989 and won him three Emmys.
If you watched on Thursday nights, you remember Alex had a girlfriend for a while, an art student named Ellen. The actress who played her, Tracy Pollan, arrived on the set in 1985. That casting turned out to matter far more than anyone on the show knew at the time.
A Twitch In His Pinky At The Height Of His Fame
By the late 1980s Fox was one of the biggest stars in the world. Back to the Future was the top-grossing movie of 1985, and he was shooting it at night while still making Family Ties by day. He married Tracy Pollan on July 16, 1988, at the West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont.
Then, while filming Doc Hollywood, he noticed his pinky finger twitching. In 1991, doctors told him it was young-onset Parkinson’s disease. He was 29, by his own account, just three years into the marriage. Talking to CBC News in 2023, he remembered the moment “when the doctor said you don’t win this, you lose.”
So he told almost no one. “I kept it to myself for seven years,” he said in that same interview. He kept working, hid the tremors with props and medication timing, and the public had no idea. The question was how long a secret like that could hold.
Going Public, Then Stepping Away From Acting
The secret held until 1998. That year, while he was starring as deputy mayor Mike Flaherty on ABC’s Spin City, Fox told People magazine he had Parkinson’s, and his face was on the cover of the December 7 issue. In 2000, he left Spin City and started the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which has since become the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson’s research in the world.
He kept acting in smaller doses for two decades, with guest turns on Boston Legal, Rescue Me and The Good Wife that earned him more Emmy attention. But in 2020, in his memoir No Time Like the Future, he announced what he called his second retirement. He told People his short-term memory for lines was going, and he wrote that the days of a twelve-hour workday and seven pages of dialogue were “best behind” him. He added that it could change, because everything changes.
It did change, and it took one phone call.
Why Harrison Ford Asked For Him On ‘Shrinking’
Apple TV’s Shrinking gave Harrison Ford a part as Dr. Paul Rhoades, a gruff therapist living with Parkinson’s. The show’s co-creator is Bill Lawrence, who had worked with Fox on Spin City and calls him his first mentor. Fox watched and picked up the phone. “I said, ‘You did a show about Parkinson’s, and you didn’t call me?'” he told People. Lawrence asked if he wanted in. “I said, ‘I’d love to do it,'” Fox remembered.
Season 3 premiered January 28, 2026, with Fox as Gerry, a fellow Parkinson’s patient Paul meets in a doctor’s waiting room. According to TVLine, Gerry first appears in the premiere and comes back in Episode 4, “The Field,” and again in Episode 7, “I Will Be Grape.” The arc grew because Lawrence took Fox at his word. After the first episode, Fox said he would happily do it again, and Lawrence has joked that whenever Fox says something like that out loud, he books him to come back in two weeks.
Ford, for his part, was protective. Fox told People at his foundation’s gala in November 2025 that Ford was “so protective of me and wanted me to have a great experience,” and called him “so brilliant and so fun to work with.” What made this job different, Fox said, was that he could finally play a man with his own illness. “It was the first time ever I get to show up on-set, and I didn’t have to worry about am I too tired or coughing or anything,” he told People. So what does the man look like now, back in front of the cameras at 65?
How Michael J. Fox Looks Now At 65
He looks like a man who is enjoying the room. At the Actor Awards on March 1, the camera found Fox seated next to his son Sam during the show’s opening, and the crowd gave him a long standing ovation before he said a word. He used the moment to get a laugh about Sam. “He’s not an actor. He’s just my date,” Fox joked, and he signed off with a line reported by several outlets: “I’m Michael J. Fox, I’m a dad, and I’m an actor.”
In September he was back on the Emmys stage to accept the Television Academy’s Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, presented by his Good Wife co-star Julianna Margulies, as The Hollywood Reporter reported. On the red carpet he sat in a director’s chair in an all-black suit, with Tracy standing beside him, her hand on his shoulder, and all four of their children around them, Sam, twins Aquinnah and Schuyler, and Esmé. In his speech, he talked about the years he hid the diagnosis, and, according to Hello!, he told the room, “I understood that accepting Parkinson’s didn’t mean I had to surrender to it.”
Then on October 2, at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, he was promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada, the top level of the country’s highest civilian honor. CTV News reported that the audience stood and applauded, and that Fox said he felt both “pride” and “humility.” We covered that day in our story on Fox’s big honor back home in Canada. Every one of those appearances had one person in common, and Fox has been very open about what all this has cost her.
What Michael J. Fox Says Tracy Pollan Has Been Through
Fox does not tell this part of the story as a fairy tale. When he talks about Tracy, he talks about guilt. “She has this disease too in a sense because I do,” he told CBC News in 2023. He has said he took a young actress whose career was taking off and, in his words, “made her a single mother and I took her out of the game,” then piled on “a trial on her that wasn’t hers to endure.”
He has been just as blunt about the day he went public. “It was hell on Tracy, it was really hard on her, and it still is because it’s always changing,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. On CBS Mornings in 2023, he put it another way. “At any time, she would have been forgiven to say, ‘I just want to step out,’ but she didn’t do that,” he said. “I love Tracy obviously and she’s an amazing person and has gone through a lot.”
Which brings the story back to where it started, on a TV set. At the Actor Awards in March, Fox told a room full of actors what acting had really given him. After those lean years in Los Angeles, he said, he landed on Family Ties and met his wife, the actress Tracy Pollan, who played his girlfriend Ellen. People’s account of the speech has him calling her the greatest gift of his career, and he joked that she then gave him four more gifts: Sam, Aquinnah, Schuyler, and Esmé. If it weren’t for acting, he reminded his kids, they wouldn’t be here.
Thirty-eight years into the marriage, his anniversary posts still read like a guy who can’t believe his luck. “37… but who’s counting? Love you, T.,” he wrote in 2025. The dropout from Burnaby got the career, lost a big piece of it, and found his way back. But the thing he thanks acting for, every chance he gets, is the young woman who walked onto the Family Ties set in 1985 to play his girlfriend.