For seven years, Michael J. Fox kept working while almost no one knew about the battle he was facing off camera.
Michael and Tracy Pollan had married in 1988 and had just started a family when, in 1991, he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s at just 29 years old.
When he told Tracy, she didn’t make a grand speech. She simply reminded him of a promise they had already made: “In sickness and in health”.
Michael decided to keep the diagnosis private for years. He kept acting, also faced his problems with alcohol, and managed to stay sober while trying to understand how his life would change.
In 1998, he finally went public with his Parkinson’s diagnosis. Two years later, he founded the Michael J. Fox Foundation, which has since devoted billions of dollars to research on the disease.
And Tracy stayed by his side.
Today, they have been married for 38 years, have four children, and at the 2026 Emmys, the whole family was there when Michael received the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award for decades of activism and Parkinson’s research.
The words Tracy said to him when everything seemed to be changing ultimately became, quite literally, the story of their marriage.