At first, he chose silence. For nearly seven years, Fox kept his diagnosis private while continuing to work at a demanding pace. On set, he learned to hide tremors, to adapt blocking and camera angles, to mask symptoms with medication and discipline. It was exhausting, both physically and emotionally. He has since described those years as a constant calculation: how much energy he had left, how visible his symptoms were, and how long he could maintain the illusion of normalcy.
By the late 1990s, that balancing act became impossible to sustain. In 1998, Fox publicly disclosed his diagnosis, a decision that marked a turning point not only in his own life but also in how Parkinson’s was discussed in the public sphere. Two years later, he founded the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, transforming his personal struggle into a focused, global effort to accelerate research and improve patient outcomes.
