Michael J. Fox made a surprise appearance at SAG-AFTRA’s 2026 Actor Awards, closing out the famed “I Am an Actor” opening sequence.
“When I left school and moved from Canada to L.A. to start making it as an actor, a teacher of mine told me, ‘Fox, you’re not going to be cute forever,’” Fox, 64, said to widespread applause. “So I said, ‘Maybe just long enough, sir.’ After a few years of dumpster diving in L.A., I ended up on Family Ties, where I received the biggest gift of my career: I met my wife, actor Tracy Pollan, who played Ellen, my girlfriend.”
Fox further gushed that Pollan, 65, gave him the gift of their four children: Sam, 36, twins Aquinnah and Schuyler, 31, and Esmé, 24.
“Sometimes I like to remind them, ‘If I weren’t an actor, they wouldn’t be here.’ By the way, he’s not an actor — he’s my date,” the Shrinking actor quipped, gesturing to Sam, who sat beside him. “I’m Michael J. Fox. I’m a dad and I’m an actor.”
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Fox married Pollan in 1988, three years before he was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s disease at the age of 29. Fox publicly disclosed his health battle seven years later.
“My life is set up so I can pack Parkinson’s along with me if I have to,” Fox said on CBS Sunday Mornings in 2023. “Yeah, it’s banging on the door. Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna lie. It’s gettin’ hard, it’s gettin’ harder. It’s gettin’ tougher. Every day it’s tougher. But that’s the way it is. You don’t die from Parkinson’s. You die with Parkinson’s.”
He continued at the time, “I’ve been thinking about the mortality of it. … I’m not gonna be 80. I’m not gonna be 80.”
Fox, who funded an eponymous nonprofit supporting Parkinson’s research, retired from acting in 2020 amid his battle. He returned to his onscreen roots in Shrinking season 3.
“It’s cool to get to write about things you care about now,” cocreator Bill Lawrence told People in a 2024 interview of portraying Parkinson’s on the hit Apple TV+ series. “Michael J. Fox is my first mentor. So we wanted to represent it in hopefully an inspiring and not sad or tragic way.”
He added, “I found the first mentor in my life and career, Michael J. Fox, to be so inspiring with the way he took it in stride and continues to work harder than anybody I know, and we want to kind of carry that spirit if we can into the show.”
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As for Fox, he’s come to terms with his mortality amid his Parkinson’s battle.
“There’s no timeline, there’s no series of stages that you go through — not in the same way that you would, say, with prostate cancer,” the Back to the Future star told The Sunday Times in 2025. “It’s much more mysterious and enigmatic. There are not many people who have had Parkinson’s for 35 years. I’d like to just not wake up one day. That’d be really cool. I don’t want it to be dramatic. I don’t want to trip over furniture, smash my head.”
