His talent, timing and boy-next-door
looks have made the kid from Burnaby,
B.C., a big hit in TV's Family Ties and
Steven Spielberg's movie, Back to the
Future. Here, he tells Allan M. Gould
how it all happened.

Michael J. Fox once shared the dreams of millions of young Canadian boys: to become
a Mountie or a professional hockey player. "So many of my, dreams were cut down by my size," he recalled last February, during a lunch break from taping an episode of Family Ties at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.

At 24, he stands 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs a mere 118 pounds -- ironically, a considerable factor in his currently successful acting career. He has continued to play
teenage roles long after he became old enough to vote and is fulfilling a teenage dream to achieve great financial success.

As Alex Keaton, the conservative son of former hippie parents, Fox has endeared himself to the show's audience of more than 20 million with his talent, timing and boy-next-door good looks. Almost everyone agrees that he is one of the key reasons that Family Ties is one of the 10 highest-rated TV shows -- just behind Dallas, Dynasty and 60 Minutes, and right up there with The Cosby Show, The A-Team and Falcon Crest. Its renewal
for a fourth season beginning this fall is certain.

What's more, Fox has copped the starring role in the latest Steven Spielberg movie, a name synonymous with such blockbusters as Jaws, E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the sci-fi adventure comedy called Back to the Future,
Michael J. Fox will play -- what else? -- a happy-go-lucky teenager. Not bad for a kid from Burnaby.

Fox was born the fourth of five children to Phyllis and Bill Fox, who served 25 years with the Canadian Armed Forces and then another 15 with the Vancouver police before retiring in 1979. Young Fox spent the first decade of his life moving from one army base to another in Ontario and the West. It was only in 1971, when he was 10, that the family settled in Burnaby, B.C., for a period of eight years.

His experience as an "army brat" -- his term -- was to encourage the family's closeness and influence Michael's personality as a comic performer. The frequent moves "promoted a kind of positive extroversion," he says. "It made me go out and meet people and relate to them right away."

And whatever his thwarted dreams of becoming a Mountie or a hockey player, Fox was always interested in performing. From the age of 6, he remembers putting on shows in his backyard. At 13, he got his first guitar, and soon he was playing with his high-school rock band, as well as performing in school plays. Then, at 15, only half a semester into an elective course on acting, his teacher notified him about auditions for a precocious 10-year-old in a local CBC production of a situation comedy called Leo and Me. "I went down to try out, and things just steamrolled," says Fox. He won the role.

Leo and Me (with Fox playing Me) ran for two seasons across Canada, while Fox continued his high school studies and also performed in various professional theatres at night. Although he was a bright student, he found the double responsibilities as student and professional actor too much to handle. After much inner struggle, he dropped out of his first semester of grade 12. He was 17.

Perhaps surprisingly, his parents supported his decision. As Fox explains, "My dad subscribes to the work ethic: it doesn't matter what you do as long as you work hard at it." But they were somewhat dazed by his quick success in his newly chosen profession. "They were excited by my acting career -- and also bemused," recalls Fox. "They were `beshappy,' to use a great word from Family Ties -- bemused and happy. But I don't think they ever thought I'd take it as far as I did."

Nor, for that matter, did Fox. At the time, his ambition was to be a rock star. "But acting
was the first to pay off in terms of financial rewards and creative satisfaction. If I had had the same opportunity in a rock group at that age, who knows?" For immediately after he had made the difficult decision to drop out of school, he says, "Boom! I got Letters!"

That was Letters From Frank, an American made-for-TV movie starring Art Carney and Maureen Stapleton. The show didn't do well in the ratings but made Fox a known property in the U.S. Soon, agents in Los Angeles started phoning him, and Fox went south to choose an agent in April 1979; then, a few months later, his father, who had retired,
drove him down to L.A. to live permanently.

There he was, at 18, living on his own in an apartment, 1,200 miles from home. "I was blindly ambitious and so excited, I wasn't aware of potential hazards," he recalls. And Fox did well in L.A. for a while, quickly landing parts in a Disney movie called Midnight Madness, and in such TV series as Family and Lou Grant. He even won a small role in Alex' Haley's shortlived series, Palmerstown, U.S.A.

Then, in early 1982, Fox's fortune turned again. After five agonizing auditions for the part of the teenage son in the pilot show for the proposed Family Ties series, Fox won the coveted role of Alex Keaton. "I needed that job so bad, I put everything I had into it," he says. And he's kept it the same way.

The wholesome image Fox portrays on the TV screen reflects his own solid family ties,
if not an admiration of Reagan-style conservatism -- he admires Gordon Gibson and his beleaguered B.C. Liberal Party. "I'm fiercely hanging on to my Canadian roots!" he declares, as he praises his family's camaraderie and talks about his visits home to Vancouver four or five times a year.

"Everyone in my family is so balanced," he adds. "They all know what their own achievements are, so none of them lives vicariously through me. What's really nice is, I've got at least 10 people at home, including all my nephews, that I'm accountable to. It keeps me out of trouble down here."

Not that there has been time to get into trouble, especially since last February, with weekday rehearsals and/or tapings of his TV show plus nightly filming on Spielberg's Back to the Future. And he loves acting. "There's a great self-release in it -- a freedom in being someone else and focusing all your energies on concerns not your own."

When Fox isn't working, he regularly plays racquetball and works out at a nearby gym.. He's also continued to be a hockey buff: he has season's tickets to the Los Angeles Kings' games, watches hockey on TV three times a week, whenever possible, and subscribes to two hockey publications.

Fox dates an actress regularly but stresses that marriage is a "project for my 30s. This [referring to establishing his acting career] is my project for my 20s." He won't reveal his earnings from Family Times, but they are assuredly considerable.

Fox appears to be as compassionate as he is successful. He is active in publicity campaigns for Easter Seals and the Variety Club and, most recently, as the national spokesman for public awareness of spine bifida.

Fox's career goal now is to make his work steadily self-perpetuating, the way the role in Spielberg's film came about because of his success in Family Ties. Not that he thinks he has now "arrived" with his starring role in Back to the Future. He's too level-headed for that. He's beginning to write scripts; he works hard at preparing his roles; and he takes each project one day at a time. "At the point where I say I've made it and crack open the champagne, he says, "that's when I'm in trouble."