Finding stability after the storm

There's a tremendous poignancy in seeing the boyish features of Michael J. Fox on screen again in the re-released hit movie Back To The Future. The film turned Fox into a superstar, fixing him in audiences' minds as Marty McFly, the 17-year-old with a fondness for time travel and skateboards.

But just six years later, in 1991, Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson's at the age of 29 — a terrible irony for a man who made his name playing a teenager to be afflicted by a disease normally associated with old age.

Fox took the news badly. "I had been cruising along the fast lane before that but the diagnosis made me an even bigger idiot," he says.

"The subsequent depression and my increasing pain isolated me from my wife Tracy and my son, Sam Michael. I hit rock bottom," he adds.

But in one rare lucid moment he realised his life was in his own hands. "So I turned myself around. Parkinson's has made me a better person. Life delivered me a catastrophe but I found a richness of soul."

The film's re-release in cinemas marks its 25th anniversary. A Blu-ray edition of Back To The Future and its two sequels has also been released.

Fifty next June, Fox remains much younger-looking than his years thanks to his trim physique and his famed stature.

A few more lines pepper his face nowadays but the charm and humour that have been his trademark in films such as The Secret Of My Success and Teen Wolf are still very much in evidence.

He also looks well and thanks to his medication he seems well in control of the disease. Today, the tremors are slight, although he occasionally holds on to his leg to steady himself.

He rarely gives interviews, as the Parkinson's impairs his speech, but his gratitude towards the film encourages him to reminisce about the movie that proved a cornerstone of his life.

Fox first noticed the symptoms of his disease in 1990 while filming Doc Hollywood. A stiffness in a finger on his left hand was dismissed by a neurologist as damage to his funny bone.

Six months later, after the problem had spread all the way up his arm to his shoulder and Fox had started to experience involuntary shaking, the diagnosis was stark: he was suffering from Parkinson's.

He continued to work, starring in films such as The American President opposite Michael Douglas and Tim Burton's brilliant sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks!, controlling his symptoms with medication while trying to keep his illness a secret.

Eventually, with his family life in turmoil, he went public in 1998, seven years after the diagnosis.

He credits his wife, actress Tracy Pollan, with helping him through these testing times. The couple got married in 1988 and had their son Sam Michael, now 21, before Fox's diagnosis.

The couple, who have been married for 22 years, went on to have three more children — twins Aquinnah Kathleen and Schuyler Frances, 15, and 9-year-old Esme Annabelle.