The J in Michael J. Fox was borrowed from another actor
When Michael Fox registered with the Screen Actors Guild, a veteran actor already owned the name. He rejected his real middle initial, A, and added a J in tribute to Michael J. Pollard of Bonnie and Clyde. Within a few years the man with the invented initial was Marty McFly in Back to the Future.
Fox was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on June 9, 1961, the fifth of six children of a signals soldier and a payroll clerk. Army postings moved the family around Canada until they settled in Burnaby, British Columbia, in 1971. At 16 he was starring in the CBC series Leo and Me, and in 1979 he left for Los Angeles. His early credits read simply Michael Fox until the guild rule forced a change; in his memoir Lucky Man he joked that Michael A. Fox sounded both vain and awkwardly Canadian.
Family Ties made him famous as the teenage conservative Alex P. Keaton, a part he got only because Matthew Broderick was unavailable. The show had been pitched around the parents, but audiences responded so strongly to Fox that his character became the focus after four episodes. Producer Brandon Tartikoff thought he was too short and said his face would never appear on a lunchbox; Fox later sent him a custom lunchbox to eat his words from, and Tartikoff kept it.
In January 1985 he replaced Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly, and for two months he rehearsed the sitcom by day and shot the film until 2:30 in the morning. The gamble paid off: Back to the Future topped the US box office for eight straight weekends and earned about $381 million worldwide. During a hanging scene in the third film he misplaced his hand on the noose and briefly lost consciousness before Robert Zemeckis had him cut down.
Privately diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991 and warned he might have ten good working years, he signed a three-film deal quickly and kept acting, later starring in Spin City. He revealed the illness in 1998, launched his research foundation in 2000, and has since received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that work.
Source: Michael J. Fox
