Michael J. Fox is one of the most beloved Canadian exports in Hollywood history, a performer whose comic timing and physical expressiveness made him the defining small-screen teenager of the 1980s before he became one of its biggest movie stars. He broke through on Family Ties (1982), then built a film career that includes Teen Wolf (1985) and the Back to the Future trilogy across 1985, 1989, and 1990, before returning to television with Spin City (1996) and winning both an Emmy and a Golden Globe before his Parkinson’s diagnosis reshaped everything that followed.

On screen, Fox operated through a quicksilver energy and physical agility that made Marty McFly feel genuinely heroic despite being played entirely for laughs, and the Back to the Future films remain the clearest record of what he could do at full flight. His open face, compact frame, and the sense that his brain was always running slightly faster than the scene around him gave him a comic signature that no one has quite replicated since. The documentary Still (2023) reminded everyone exactly what had been lost.