Michael J. Fox was once told Parkinson's would end his acting career within a decade; 35 years after his diagnosis, he's heading back to set. The 65-year-old says he'll return for season four of Apple TV's Shrinking (which focuses in part on Parkinson's) and is currently Emmy-nominated for his season-three role—despite having declared himself "retired" from acting during the pandemic because his speech had become unreliable. Acting, he now says, has stretched and enriched his life: "I'm not retired from acting, but if I didn't act again, it would be for a very good reason. I let Parkinson's make decisions for me," he tells the Hollywood Reporter. But of his return, he says, "It's really prolonged my life and made my life interesting in a way that I didn't think it would be to this point."
Since publicly disclosing his diagnosis in 1998, Fox has become the most visible face of the disease and a major force behind research—a decision he says was tough for wife Tracy Pollan. "It was hell on Tracy, it was really hard on her—and it still is because it's always changing," Fox says. He and Pollan married in 1988, three years before his diagnosis at age 29, per EW. "But I said to her, 'I have to go all the way here. No half measures.'"
The Michael J. Fox Foundation, launched in 2000 with co-founder Deborah W. Brooks, has steered more than $3 billion into Parkinson's science and aims to secure $700 million in new commitments this year—outpacing US government funding, Brooks says. The foundation has helped push some 180 Parkinson's drugs into human trials and backed a biomarker test that can detect the disease before symptoms appear. Fox, who once quietly checked online forums to see how patients felt about him, now sees his openness as essential: "I have to not hide this. F--- vanity." Read the full interview here.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
