Michael J. Fox has undergone spinal surgery but is on the mend, according to a report in People magazine.
The much-loved actor has been fighting Parkinson’s disease since 1991 but his spokesperson told People that the surgery was unrelated to Parkinson’s. The spokesperson did not elaborate on the reason for the operation but said that he was now recovering and “looking forward to getting back on the golf course this summer”.
Fox pulled out of an appearance at an entertainment expo in Canada that was scheduled for April 26-29, which People said was likely to due to the surgery. But a new health battle is unlikely to slow the 56-year-old down, given that he continues to act, continues to raise millions of dollars for Parkinson’s research, has written three books, and regularly speaks about his own experiences with the condition in order to raise awareness.
Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at just 29 but didn’t publicly reveal his diagnosis until seven years later, in 1998, and has always remained publicly upbeat about his health, even suing a US magazine called Globe in 2016 for claiming he had suffered a huge physical and mental decline as a result of Parkinson’s. Globe was forced to print an apology that said, in part, that the actor continued to “live a fulfilling, successful life”.
Indeed, in that year he was nominated for an Emmy for his work on drama series The Good Wife, and as recently as earlier this week he was tweeting video clips from his new hit American political series, Designated Survivor, in which Keifer Sutherland plays the US president, and Fox plays an attorney called Ethan West.
Fox posted a pic of the two actors messing around in the ‘Oval Office’ on set in March, comparing it to a shot of the pair 30 years earlier, when the pair played drug-taking New Yorkers in Bright Lights, Big City. Joking about their bad behaviour in the first movie, Fox captioned the snap, “If 30 years ago these 2 Canadians knew they would be working in the Oval Office, they would have been on better behavior”.
Of course, Fox is known for his wit, which he first delighted viewers with as the acerbic teenager Alex P. Keaton on the long-running sitcom Family Ties in the 1980s, then kept them laughing as New York’s deputy mayor Mike Flaherty on Spin City in the ’90s. And he hasn’t lost his touch as he’s aged, even joking about the effects of Parkinson’s.
Speaking in March 2017 to the AARP’s magazine, he said that seeing the funny side of his illness helped him keep it in perspective.
“You deal with the condition, and you deal with people’s perception of the condition,” he explained. “It was easy for me to tune in to the way other people were looking into my eyes and seeing their own fear reflected back … I’d assure them that ‘I’m doing great’ — because I was. After a while, the disconnect between the way I felt and the dread people were projecting just seemed, you know, funny.”