During our interview, surrounded by the memorabilia (guitars, Golden Globes) he has accrued over the course of his career, he talked about how it had all been for the best. Parkinson’s, he said, had made him quit drinking, which in turn had probably saved his marriage. Being diagnosed at the heartbreakingly young age of 29 had also knocked the ego out of his career ambitions, so he could do smaller things he was proud of – Stuart Little, the TV sitcom Spin City – as opposed to the big 90s comedies, such as Doc Hollywood, that were too often a waste of his talents. To be honest, I didn’t entirely buy his tidy silver linings, but who was I to cast doubt on whatever perspective Fox had developed to make a monstrously unjust situation more bearable? So the sudden dose of pragmatism astonished me. Finding a cure for Parkinson’s, he said, “is not something that I view will happen in my lifetime”. Previously, he had talked about finding “a cure within a decade”. No more. “That’s just the way it goes,” he said quietly. It was like a dark cloud had partly obscured the sun.
Things being as they currently are, this time Fox and I are meeting by video chat, me in my home in London, him in his office in New York, which looks just as I remember it. “We were here last time, right? I remember,” Fox says, pointing with his chin towards the sofa. Behind him is a photo of him and his wife of 32 years, the actor Tracy Pollan, both of them looking so young, beautiful and in love. There is also a painting of his dog, Gus, who is in his usual place, sleeping at Fox’s feet. Fox himself, still as boyishly handsome as ever, looks much better than I’d feared. He is 59 now, close to the average age for a Parkinson’s diagnosis – except that Fox has already had it for 30 years and is in the advanced stages. As he says, “You don’t die from Parkinson’s, but you do die with it,” and typically the longer you have it, the harder it becomes to carry out basic functions. He can no longer play his beloved guitar, and can’t write or type; this latest book was dictated to Fox’s assistant. He has increasing difficulty in forming words, and occasionally needs a wheelchair. I worried beforehand that talking to me for an hour would be too much, and – less professionally – that I might cry at seeing the physical degeneration of the actor who meant so much to me as a kid.
It soon becomes apparent that both these concerns hugely underestimate Fox. He talks for not just one hour but almost two, and while the tremors, stiffness and occasional word stumbles are more pronounced than when I last saw him, he is very much the funny, thoughtful and engaged man I remember – so much so that within minutes I stop noticing the effects of the Parkinson’s. Here’s a typical exchange: at the time of our interview, the US election is still three weeks away, so we talk about that. “Every worst instinct in mankind has been played on [by Trump], and for me that’s just anathema. Biff is president!” he says, with justified exasperation, given that Back To The Future’s evil bully Biff Tannen was modelled on Trump.
I ask how he felt during the 2016 campaign when Trump mocked the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has a disability. “When you see your particular group mocked, it’s such a gut punch. It’s so senseless and cheap. There’s no way I get up in the morning and mock orange people,” he says, and then makes the grin that, for those of us who grew up watching him in the 1980s and 90s, is our Proustian madeleine.
by Hadley Freeman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jeff Lipsky/CPi Syndication
