Michael J. Fox had to look back to the future to decide whether to retire.
“Back to the Future” icon explained to Empire magazine (via Joke on screen) that Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s set “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” inspired him to seriously consider giving up acting. Fox detailed that in “The Good Wife” spin-off “The Good Fight,” he had difficulty remembering his lines due to his Parkinson’s disease.
“I thought about ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’. There is a scene where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character can no longer remember his lines. He goes back to his dressing room and is screaming at himself in the mirror. Just damn crazy,” Fox said. “I had this moment where I was looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘I can’t remember this anymore. Well, let’s move on.’ He was calm.
Fox will receive the Museum of Moving Image’s Lifetime Achievement Award in June 2023. Among his accolades, Fox has won five Emmys, four Golden Globes, a Grammy, two Screen Actors Guild awards, the People’s Choice award, and GQ Man of the Year d ‘honor. In 2000, he launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which is now the world’s leading Parkinson’s organization. To date, the foundation has raised more than $1.5 billion.
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The actor admitted in April 2023 that “every day it gets tougher” with his illness. ““You don’t die of Parkinson’s, you die with Parkinson’s. So I thought about the mortality of him,” Fox said. “I won’t be 80.”
Fox charts her health journey in the documentary “STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” which premiered at the 2023 Sundance. Directed by “An Inconvenient Truth” director David Guggenheim, the film captures Fox’s career after the was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 30.
“Every tremor is like an earthquake. But she never says, ‘Look how I suffered,’” Guggenheim exclusively told IndieWire’s Anne Thompson of the partnership with Fox. “She went through hell that year (during production). More time in the emergency room than at home. Yet he never complained or complained, you know? ‘Dude, you gotta at least, let me teach you how to talk about your pain. Because I’m really good at it.’ He just doesn’t want to be pitied. He says, ‘pity is a benign form of abuse.’”
