Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan have been married for over three decades, which is a
huge deal, especially in the scandalous world of Hollywood.
The couple has been the definition of strength since their lives were turned upside down
three years into their marriage.
While Pollan and Fox had an on-screen romance in Family Ties, a real-life relationship didn’t
blossom right away.
At the time, Tracy was going steady with ’80s heartthrob Kevin Bacon.
The two had met five years earlier while doing a play together and shared an apartment in
New York and a farmhouse in Connecticut.
Pollan regularly commuted back to the East Coast from LA, where Family Ties was filmed.
“I fly home to Kevin the second filming shuts down,” she said.
“We will probably marry, but I feel like we’re kids still, and marriage is such a
grown-up thing.”
Meanwhile, Michael had become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood thanks to Back to the Future,
so life had become a whirlwind for him, with movie offers pouring in.
Moreover, he was in
a long-term relationship with actor Nancy McKeon.
“I always thought Tracy was cool,” Fox said years later, “but it was like a couple
of married people who worked together and liked each other.”
Fox and Pollan’s relationship is said to have blossomed on the set of the movie Bright
Lights, Big City, not long after Lemon Sky, the movie on which Bacon met the love of his
life, Kyra Sedgwick , premiered.
“It sounds really horrible, but it was one of those things,” the actor said.
“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?’”
Michael and Tracy started dating, and seven months later, he proposed.
At the time, the young star admitted he was most nervous about the wedding’s secrecy.
“I wasn’t really worried that she would say no,” he recalled.
“The toughest part was trying to figure out when to get married, and then to figure
out how nobody else could know about it.”
They had cause for concern.
Pollan and Fox had started to get threatening letters — up to 15 a day — in February
1988.
The frightening messages prompted the actor to tighten security everywhere he went, and
Pollan started using an alias when she travelled.
Soon after, the accused threat-maker pleaded guilty to three counts of making terrorist
threats and was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to stay away from the
family.
And the couple was determined not to put their lives on hold.
Despite their best efforts, though, the paparazzi sent helicopters to crash their wedding day.
But, of course, that did not stop the happy couple from having a good time!
When Pollan got pregnant, Fox squeezed Lamaze classes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK7XgcIyrsE&ab_channel=MandyIrby
0.00) into his shooting schedule.
“We did the whole womb music deal, where we put the headphones on Tracy’s stomach
and played everything from Vivaldi to the Allman Brothers.”
And what do you know?
Life was about to blindside the couple.
Though, not in a way, they could have ever prepared for.
Two years after they welcomed their boy, Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at
the very young age of 29.
While on location filming Doc Hollywood, he began to notice trembling in his fingers and
hand.
The trembling was the first symptom of early-onset Parkinson’s, an incurable degenerative condition
of the central nervous system that affects motor function over time.
When it happened, he told Tracy that it was going to be okay, but he was actually freaking
out.
“I had no idea what Parkinson’s was, and I was in denial.
You’ve probably read in People that I’m a nice guy — but when the doctor first told
me I had Parkinson’s, I wanted to kill him.
I thought, ‘What a shitty thing to say to somebody!’
I just knew it was a mistake.”
It’s been more than 30 years since the day he had to break the news to his wife, but
the memory of her reaction is still enough to move him to tears.
“We didn’t know what to expect,” Fox said.
“One of the things I’ll always love Tracy for is that at that moment, she didn’t blink.”
At the time, no one could really tell, so he opted not to share the news outside a trusted
inner circle.
His family handled it quietly, but eventually, Fox fell into a depression and started drinking
heavily.
It would be a while before he got a handle on his new reality.
Fox’s drink of choice was wine — sometimes by the bottle — and he began to hide the
bottles from Tracy.
But Pollan knew what was going on, and his drinking and dark mood caused friction between
the couple.
“I used to drink to party,” the actor recalled on The Howard Stern Show back in
2013, “but… now I was drinking alone and to just not be present.
I was isolating myself from my family.”
Fox’s moment of reckoning came when Pollan found him one morning, passed out on the floor.
She didn’t get angry.
Instead, she looked “bored,” asking him, “Is this what you want?
Is this what you want to be?”
Pollan then walked out the door.
He realized he had no choice but to take life “one day at a time.”
“After that,” he recalled, “Tracy said to me, ‘You showed up again.
Your sense of humor was back, and you were just there.’”
Pollan said that she had tougher days than others, but those were mainly when he seemed
unsure of what she was going to do, which manifested in his erratic behaviour.
“Through it all, we’ve loved each other,” Fox said.
“And that love never died,” Pollan added.
“We had a solid foundation to begin with.”
And in 1998, Fox finally went public about his disease.
After undergoing brain surgery to help relieve tremors caused by the condition, the actor
publicly revealed that he had Parkinson’s.
It was a shocking moment for anyone who counted themselves a fan of the star or who even just
remembered him as the forever-young Marty McFly and a turning point for Parkinson’s
visibility.
From that day forward, Fox became the celebrity face of the cause, and he and Pollan have
worked tirelessly since to raise money for research and awareness.
They launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which has become the largest nonprofit funder
of Parkinson’s research globally.
So far, they have raised nearly $1 billion to speed a cure for Parkinson’s disease.
Fox had to endure some difficult stretches with his condition, and Pollan’s sense of
humour has helped a great deal.
She’s there in the front lines with Michael every single day.
“Well, Tracy’s amazing,” he said.
“If there’s something funny, let’s get to the funny.
We’ll deal with the tragic later, she says.”
He really needed her support in 2018, when his trademark optimism waned during one of
the darkest periods of his life.
First, Fox underwent spinal surgery to remove a tumour, which forced him to relearn how
to walk.
Then four months later, he suffered a fall in their home and shattered his arm.
“I was underneath the phone, on the kitchen floor, alone, with a broken arm, waiting for
the ambulance to show up,” he said.
“I couldn’t believe the amount of fury I had toward myself for being so careless
to do this and to let down my surgeons.”
But ultimately, he realized that one could be a realist and an optimist at the same time.
If you don’t accept it, you can’t move forward.
Fittingly for a man with five Emmy Awards, watching television helped restore his positive
outlook on life.
He binge-watched old Westerns from the ’50s and ’60s while recovering from his broken
arm.
“I kind of realized that this happened before I was born, these shows,” he said.
“I’m part of that continuum.
I’ll be survived by my reruns.
That gave me a bit of a dash of immortality.
And they all pointed me toward how grateful I was for my interaction with my kids.”
Two years after the accident, Fox celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Michael J. Fox
Foundation.
They started the foundation literally with nothing.
And now they are responsible for 17 active therapies that are being used that were never
thought of before.
“This is our 20th year.
If we knew it was gonna be 2020, we would’ve started a year earlier or a year later because
this year really blows,” he quipped.
Fox also retired from acting due to the effects of living with Parkinson’s.
He previously retired at 40, and he threw his energy into his foundation, but he later
returned to acting, guest-starring on The Good Wife and Rescue Me, the latter of which
earned him his fifth Emmy.
TV and film aside, Fox has regained his optimism and literally takes life one step at a time
due to his condition.
“You have to plant your heel and shift your hips and transfer weight.
I mean, all this mechanical biokinetics you have to go through to just go get a cup of
coffee across the room,” he said of his life now.
“But if every time, you risk falling, every step is precious.”
He shared that constantly being asked how he’s doing can get a little tiresome, but
he hasn’t let it dampen his outlook on life.
“Optimism is a choice,” he added.
“But in a way, it isn’t.
There’s no other choice.
I don’t think there’s any other viable choice than to hope for the best and work
toward it.”
When Oprah Winfrey asked if he felt Parkinson’s had been a gift for their marriage, giving
them no choice but to become stronger and more in sync if they were to keep on going,
Fox said, “I’ve often referred to Parkinson’s as the gift that keeps on taking.
It’s a gift in that it really gave me a whole different appreciation for life.
It hasn’t allowed me to take anything for granted.”
Date nights for the couple still include trips to the Emmys and the Oscars — but he and
Pollan make a point of enjoying each other’s company everywhere, whether it’s in another
country or on the couch watching TV.
And they deal every day with Fox’s condition, but always together, as a team.
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