Michael Andrew Fox was born on June 9, 1961 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Phyllis (née Piper), an actress/payroll clerk, and William Fox, a police officer and Canadian Forces member. He is of Irish, English and Scottish descent. His family lived in various cities and towns across Canada because of his father’s career. They finally moved to Burnaby, a large suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, when his father retired in 1971. His father died on January 6, 1990 from a heart attack. Fox attended Burnaby Central Secondary School, and now has a theatre named for him at Burnaby South Secondary. At age 15, Fox starred in the Canadian television series Leo and Me, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and in 1979, at age 18, he moved to Los Angeles to further his acting career. Shortly after his marriage, he decided to move back to Vancouver. Fox is one of four members of the Leo and Me cast and crew who eventually developed Parkinson’s disease in mid-life, an unusually high number that led to some investigation as to whether an environmental factor may have played a role.

In January 1985, Fox was cast to replace Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, a teenager who is accidentally sent back in time from 1985 to 1955 in Back to the Future. Director Robert Zemeckis originally wanted Fox to play Marty, but Gary David Goldberg the creator of Family Ties, which Fox was working on at the time, refused to allow Zemeckis even to approach Fox as he felt that as Meredith Baxter was on maternity leave at the time, Fox’s character Alex Keaton was needed to carry the show in her absence. Eric Stoltz was cast and was already filming Back to the Future, but Zemeckis felt that Stoltz was not giving the right type of performance for the humor involved. Zemeckis quickly replaced Stoltz with Fox, whose schedule was now more open with the return of Meredith Baxter. He was considered for the role of Mark Kendall in Once Bitten, but it eventually went to Jim Carrey. During filming, Fox rehearsed for Family Ties from 10 a.m to 6 p.m, then rushed to the Back to the Future set where he would rehearse and shoot until 2:30 a.m. This schedule lasted for two full months. Back to the Future was both a commercial and critical success. The film spent 8 consecutive weekends as the number-one grossing movie at the US box office in 1985, and eventually earned a worldwide total of $381.11 million. Variety applauded the performances, opining that Fox and his co-star Christopher Lloyd imbued Marty and Doc Brown’s friendship with a quality reminiscent of King Arthur and Merlin. The film was followed by two successful sequels, Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Back to the Future Part III (1990).

Fox met his future wife, Tracy Pollan, when she played the role of his girlfriend, Ellen, on Family Ties. They were married on July 16, 1988, at West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont. The couple have four children: son Sam Michael (born May 30, 1989), twin daughters Aquinnah Kathleen and Schuyler Frances (born February 15, 1995), and daughter Esmé Annabelle (born November 3, 2001). Fox holds dual Canadian-US citizenship. He provided a light-hearted segment during the 2010 Winter Olympics’ closing ceremony in Vancouver, British Columbia on February 28, 2010 when he expressed how proud he is to be Canadian. On June 4, 2010, the city of Burnaby, British Columbia granted him the Freedom of the City. Fox and his family live primarily in Manhattan. The family owns a second home in Quogue, New York.

In 1991, he starred in Doc Hollywood, a romantic comedy about a talented medical doctor who decides to become a plastic surgeon. While moving from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, he winds up as a doctor in a small southern town in South Carolina. Michael Caton-Jones, from Time Out, described Fox in the film as “at his frenetic best”. The Hard Way was also released in 1991, with Fox playing an undercover actor learning from police officer James Woods. After being privately diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 and being cautioned he had “ten good working years left”, Fox hastily signed a three-film contract, appearing in For Love or Money (1993), Life With Mikey (1993), and Greedy (1994). The mid-1990s saw Fox play smaller supporting roles in The American President (1995) and Mars Attacks! (1996).

Fox started displaying symptoms of early-onset Parkinson’s disease in 1991 while shooting the movie Doc Hollywood, and was diagnosed shortly after. After his diagnosis, Fox started drinking heavily and suffered from depression. He eventually sought help and stopped drinking altogether. In 1998, he decided to go public about his Parkinson’s disease, and since then, he has been a strong advocate of Parkinson’s disease research. His foundation, The Michael J. Fox Foundation, was created to help advance every promising research path to curing Parkinson’s disease, including embryonic stem cell studies. Since 2010, he has led a $100 million effort, which is the Foundation’s landmark observational study, to discover the biological markers of Parkinson’s disease with the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI).

Fox manages the symptoms of his Parkinson’s disease with the drug carbidopa/levodopa, and he also had a thalamotomy in 1998.

His first book, Lucky Man, focused on how, after seven years of denial of the disease, he set up the Michael J. Fox Foundation, stopped drinking and began to be an advocate for people living with Parkinson’s disease. In Lucky Man, Fox wrote that he did not take his medication prior to his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee in 1999 (full C-SPAN video clip).

Spin City ran from 1996 to 2002 on American television network ABC. The show was based on a fictional local government running New York City, originally starring Fox as Mike Flaherty, a Fordham Law School graduate serving as the Deputy Mayor of New York. Fox won an Emmy award for Spin City in 2000, three Golden Globe Awards in 1998, 1999, and 2000, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards in 1999 and 2000. During the third season of Spin City, Fox made the announcement to the cast and crew of the show that he had Parkinson’s disease. During the fourth season, he announced his retirement from the show. He announced that he planned to continue to act and would make guest appearances on Spin City (he made three more appearances on the show during the final season). After leaving the show, he was replaced by Charlie Sheen, who portrayed the character Charlie Crawford. Altogether, 145 episodes were produced. Fox also served as an executive producer during his time on the show, alongside co-creators Bill Lawrence and Gary David Goldberg.

In an interview with NPR in April 2002, Fox explained what he does when he becomes symptomatic during an interview:

In 2004, Fox guest starred in two episodes of the comedy-drama Scrubs as Dr. Kevin Casey, a surgeon with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. The series was created by Spin City creator Bill Lawrence. In 2006, he appeared in four episodes of Boston Legal as a lung cancer patient. The producers brought him back in a recurring role for season three, beginning with the season premiere. Fox was nominated for an Emmy Award for best guest appearance.

In 2006, Fox starred in a campaign ad for then-State Auditor of Missouri Claire McCaskill in her successful 2006 Senate campaign against incumbent Jim Talent, expressing her support for embryonic stem cell research. In the ad, he visibly showed the effects of his Parkinson’s disease:

His work led him to be named one of the 100 people “whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world” in 2007 by Time magazine. On March 5, 2010, Fox received an honorary doctorate in medicine from Karolinska Institutet for his contributions to research in Parkinson’s disease. He has also received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of British Columbia.

In 2009, he appeared in five episodes of the television series Rescue Me which earned him an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series. Since 2000 Fox has released three books, Lucky Man: A Memoir (2002), Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist (2009), and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future: Twists and Turns and Lessons Learned (2010). Starting in 2010, Fox played a recurring role in the US drama The Good Wife as crafty attorney Louis Canning and earned Emmy nominations for three consecutive years. In 2011, Fox was featured as himself in the eighth season of the Larry David vehicle, Curb Your Enthusiasm. David’s character (also himself) becomes a temporary resident of the New York City apartment building that Fox resides in and a conflict arises between the two, whereby David believes that Fox is using his condition (Parkinson’s disease) as a manipulative tool. Fox returned in 2017 for a brief appearance, referencing his prior time on the show. On August 20, 2012, NBC announced The Michael J. Fox Show, loosely based on his life. It was granted a 22-episode commitment from the network and premiered on NBC on September 26, 2013.

The New York Times called it “one of the most powerful and talked about political advertisements in years” and polls indicated that the commercial had a measurable impact on the way voters voted, in an election that McCaskill won. His second book, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, describes his life between 1999 and 2009, with much of the book centered on how Fox got into campaigning for stem-cell research. On March 31, 2009, Fox appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show with Mehmet Oz to discuss his condition as well as his book, his family and his primetime special, which aired May 7, 2009, (Michael J. Fox: Adventures of an Incurable Optimist).

Fox also made several appearances in other media. At the 2010 Winter Olympics closing ceremony in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he delivered comedy monologues, along with William Shatner and Catherine O’Hara, in the “I am Canadian” part of the show. Along with Tatjana Patitz, Fox appears in the 2011 Carl Zeiss AG calendar, photographed by Bryan Adams in New York City in mid-2010.

Despite a sound-alike, A.J. Locascio, voicing his character of Marty McFly in the 2011 Back to the Future episodic adventure game, Fox lent his likeness to the in-game version of Marty alongside Christopher Lloyd. Fox made a special guest appearance in the final episode of the series as an elder version of Marty, as well as his great-grandfather Willie McFly. In 2018, Fox was cast in the recurring role of Ethan West on the second season of the ABC political drama Designated Survivor.

On May 31, 2012, he received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the Justice Institute of British Columbia to recognize his accomplishments as a performer as well as his commitment to raising research funding and awareness for Parkinson’s disease. Fox recalled performing in role-playing simulations as part of police recruit training exercises at the Institute early in his career.

Fox’s first feature film roles were Midnight Madness (1980) and Class of 1984 (1982), credited in both as Michael Fox. Shortly afterward, he began playing “Young Republican” Alex P. Keaton in the show Family Ties, which aired on NBC for seven seasons from 1982–89. In an interview with Jimmy Fallon in April 2014, Fox stated he negotiated the role at a payphone at Pioneer Chicken. He received the role only after Matthew Broderick was unavailable. Family Ties had been sold to the television network using the pitch “Hip parents, square kids”, with the parents originally intended to be the main characters. However, the positive reaction to Fox’s performance led to his character becoming the focus of the show following the fourth episode. At its peak, the audience for Family Ties drew one-third of America’s households every week. Fox won three Emmy awards for Family Ties in 1986, 1987, and 1988. He also won a Golden Globe Award in 1989.

In 2016, his organization the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research created a raffle to raise awareness for Parkinson’s disease and raised $6.75 million, with the help of Nike via two auctions, one in Hong Kong and the other in London.