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It’s only fitting that Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan met on a show called Family Ties.
A lot of care went into picking the right actress to play Alex P. Keaton’s girlfriend, a strong woman who could match wits with the young Reaganite. Enter Pollan as dancer Ellen Reed.
“Alex and Ellen have an old-fashioned relationship,” Pollan told People in 1986, the year Fox won the first of his three consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. “It’s unjaded and optimistic with the sweetness of a first love.”
Alex and Ellen didn’t last, but Fox and Pollan celebrated 38 years of marriage in July. And the Shrinking actor has won three more Emmys since—including the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award he’ll be presented with during the 78th Emmy Awards on Sept. 14—with his leading lady by his side.
Not that they clicked immediately.
“I always thought [Tracy] was cool,” Fox told People years later, “but it was like a couple of married people who worked together and liked each other.”
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Fox had become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood thanks to the success of 1985’s Back to the Future, so life was going at warp-speed, with movie offers pouring in to supplement his full-time job on NBC’s Family Ties.
“Before Tracy and I started seeing each other, I was this boy prince of Hollywood,” Fox told O. “I had a Mercedes and a Ferrari and a Range Rover, and I was really nuts.”
And he was in a relationship with Facts of Life actress Nancy McKeon.
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Plus, as Pollan told People in 1986, “I fly home to Kevin the second filming shuts down.”
As in Kevin Bacon, at the time her boyfriend of five years with whom she shared a Manhattan apartment and a Connecticut farmhouse.
“We will probably marry, but I feel like we’re kids still, and marriage is such a grown-up thing,” Pollan said. But also, she added, “I’m gushingly in love.”
Yet by the time Fox was rumored to be romancing Courteney Cox, who was playing Alex’s new girlfriend Lauren Miller, he and Pollan were an item IRL.
“It’s really funny,” the actor told People in December 1987. “People always want to read there’s romance when it’s just two actors having a good time working with each other. I’m having a great personal relationship with Tracy and a great professional relationship with Courteney.”
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Their love had finally blossomed on the set of the movie Bright Lights, Big City, which came out in 1988—not long after Lemon Sky, the TV movie on which Bacon met the love of his life, Kyra Sedgwick, premiered. (And the respective couples remain friends to this day.)
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“It sounds really horrible, but it was one of those things,” Fox told People in 1989. “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?'”
He proposed on Dec. 26, 1987, seven months after he and Pollan started dating.
“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 got married on July 16, 1988, at West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vt.—and though the paparazzi found them and helicopters provided an aerial view of the remote location, they had a blast.
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When Pollan got pregnant, Fox squeezed Lamaze classes into his shooting schedule. Their first child, son Sam Michael Fox, was born on May 30, 1989.
“Tracy had a really good pregnancy, and it was a good delivery. Thank God, she was healthy and Sam was healthy,” Fox told People in December 1989. “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.”
He added, “It’s been a pretty busy 10 years. It’s felt like 30.”
But he and Pollan loved being parents.
“I kind of shut the door and said to everyone we love who wanted to see the baby, ‘Just give us a little bit of time to get used to it ourselves,'” he said. “What’s interesting is that the parental instinct just kicks in. The next thing you know, you’ve got a sore hip because you’re holding him all the time.”
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And at the time, wherever Fox went, his family joined him.
“Sam doesn’t get it,” he said. “You can’t explain to him that I’m doing a movie. He doesn’t really care. All he knows is that he’s being dragged someplace. When he was 3 months old, he flew to Canada, then to New York City, then drove to Martha’s Vineyard and Vermont, then flew from New Hampshire back to L.A. He’s seeing the world, and it all looks the same to him. When you’re that age, it’s as exciting to go to Van Nuys.”
Asked if they thought about having more children, Fox said, “Tracy and I kind of have an agreement. While we’re still changing diapers, we don’t even talk about it. But I think it’s likely; we both come from big families.”
Whether or not they looked to their own still-married parents as inspiration, he added, “A lot of that is unspoken. We don’t say, ‘We’re going to be together forever.’ It’s not that Pollyanna-ish. We just say, ‘This is a cool thing. Let’s not talk about it—and maybe it won’t go away.'”
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But life was about to throw a curveball they couldn’t have imagined.
“I thought I’d hurt my shoulder doing some stunt because I had a twitch in my pinkie,” Fox recalled on The Late Show With David Letterman in 2015. “And the doctor said, ‘You have Parkinson’s disease.’ He said, ‘The good news is that you have 10 years of work left.'”
Fox was 29 when, in 1991, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, an incurable degenerative condition of the central nervous system that affects motor function over time. At the time, however, no one could really tell, so he opted not to share the news outside of his trusted inner circle. Fox was working but eventually fell into a depression and started drinking heavily.
“I used to drink to party,” the actor recalled on The Howard Stern Show in 2013, “but…now I was drinking alone and to just not be [present]. Every day.”
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“So once I did that,” he continued, “then there was about a year of, like, a knife fight in a closet, where I just didn’t have my tools to deal with it. Then after that, I went into therapy and it all started to get really clear to me.”
He realized he had no choice but to take life “one day at a time.” Once he figured that out, “then everything started to really turn the other way. My marriage got great, and my career…”
Fox had multiple movies come out every year between 1991 and 1996, when he returned to TV on ABC’s Spin City, about the goings-on behind the scenes at the New York City mayor’s office. He quickly found himself back in the running for lead actor in a comedy Emmys every year, winning again in 2000 after voluntarily leaving the series.
By then, his secret was out. After undergoing brain surgery to help relieve tremors caused by his condition, Fox publicly shared that he had Parkinson’s in 1998—a shocking moment for longtime fans of the star, as well as a turning point for Parkinson’s visibility.
From that day on he became the celebrity face of the cause, the Michael J. Fox Foundation having since raised more than $3 billion for Parkinson’s research since its launch in 2000.
“The reason I wasn’t telling was that I wondered if people would still laugh if they knew I was sick,” Fox told Winfrey in 2002. “Can you laugh at a sick person [onscreen] and not feel like an a–hole? I finally thought, Let me not worry about that. What other people think is none of my business. I just have to have faith in the audience. If it’s funny, they’ll laugh.”
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As for his life off-camera, the actor noted, “When Chris Rock did a benefit for our foundation, he talked about the marriage vows. He said, ‘What do they mean when they say, ‘For richer’? Of course a woman will stay with you if you’re rich! The vows should ask, ‘Will you stay with me if I’m sick and broke?’ If the woman says yes, then you’re in.”
Howard Stern suggested to Fox that maybe his marriage “got great” after he realized that Pollan wasn’t going anywhere after his diagnosis.
“Exactly,” Fox agreed.
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Meanwhile, it never occurred to Pollan to not be married to Fox. She quipped to Winfrey that her husband’s diagnosis instantaneously cured her own hypochondria, but she acknowledged that there was “absolutely” an adjustment period.
“A lot of my adjustment has been dictated by Michael’s point of view,” she said. “He’s so relaxed and so accepting of where he is, and that makes it easier for me, the kids, and everyone around him.”
In the meantime, Fox and Pollan had welcomed twin daughters Aquinnah Kathleen Fox and Schuyler Phyllis Fox on Feb. 15, 1995, and daughter Esmé Annabelle Fox was born on Nov. 3, 2001.
“When I was first diagnosed, my line to Tracy was ‘It’s going to be okay’—but I was really freaking out,” Fox told Winfrey. “I had no idea what Parkinson’s was, and I was in denial. After the diagnosis I didn’t even get a neurologist. 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.”
He continued, “So I started drinking a little more to keep from looking at it. I finally got to a pivotal point where I really worked on understanding it. About three years after I’d been diagnosed, I was okay—and that’s when life got much better.”
“After that,” he recalled, “Tracy said to me, ‘You showed up again. Your sense of humor was back, and you were just there.”
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When Winfrey asked if he felt Parkinson’s had been a gift for their marriage, giving them no choice but to become closer if they were to stay together, 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. I discovered that I wasn’t me minus Parkinson’s. I was me plus it. I have been enriched by what it has opened up for me. It hasn’t allowed me to take anything for granted.”
Before his diagnosis, he added, “I had been constantly taking care of this and making sure that was okay, and now Tracy and I are just in it.”
“Through it all we’ve loved each other,” Fox said. Added Pollan, “And that love never died. We had a solid foundation to begin with.”
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And to this day, Fox and Pollan remain “just in it.”
“There are so many times when you have arguments, when you have things come up, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with what he did or said—it’s how I am projecting that onto myself,” Pollan told People in 2015 at their foundation’s annual benefit, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Cure Parkinson’s. “A lot of times he’ll just say to me, ‘You know who I am, would I ever say anything to try to hurt your feelings? Just give me the benefit of the doubt.'”
Plus, Fox is “an amazing father,” Pollan added. “He’s one of the smartest people I know…and he’s pretty cute still!”
Fox told Good Housekeeping in 2011 that he and Pollan made a point of taking a trip just the two of them every year and try to save gift giving for birthdays and Christmas—but sometimes he slipped up and bought his wife presents for Valentine’s Day.
“You know, when our twins were born, they were induced, and we had a choice between February 14th or 15th, and we decided the 15th, because we didn’t want to never be able to have a Valentine’s dinner because it’d be the girls’ birthday,” Fox said. “So she carried that weight around an extra day so we could have Valentine’s Day.”
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Now 40 years since Family Ties brought them together, date nights still include trips to the Emmys, the Oscars and—this year, at least—the NBA Finals. But Fox 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.
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And they deal every day with Fox’s condition, together, as a team.
“Tracy wasn’t sentimental or romantic about it at all,” he told AARP magazine in 2017 about how his wife reacted to his Parkinson’s diagnosis back in 1991. “Tracy was just like, ‘You’ve got a stone in your shoe. We’ll do what we can until you can get it out. In the meantime, if you limp with the stone, that’s all right. You can hold my hand, and we’ll get over that.'”
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For their 35th anniversary in 2023, Fox shared photos of them through the years, writing, “35 years of laugher, living, listening and loving you @tracy.pollan. Thank you for it all.”
And on their 36th, Pollan shared a throwback from Martha’s Vineyard along with a newer shot: “Same spot, different year!” she wrote. “Happy anniversary my love, we haven’t changed a bit…I love you!”
This year for their 38th, Fox simply wrote, “Every day is a holiday, and anniversaries are even better. Love you so.”
The director called action and they kept rolling. Read on for more famous couples who found lasting love on set:
Don’t miss the Emmy Awards 2026 live telecast Monday, Sept. 14, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on NBC and streaming on Peacock.
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