(Credits: Mark Seliger)
Sat 4 October 2025 14:15, UK
Although Michael J Fox will forever be known as Marty McFly, there’s a very good reason for that, in the same way Sigourney Weaver will always be Ripley and Orson Welles will always be Citizen Kane.
When an actor appears in a role that important, in a film that genuinely ranks as one of the finest ever made, they move into the realm of the eternally remembered.
But that’s not to say that Fox’s career began and ended with Back to the Future, because of course it didn’t at all. He was already very well known to US audiences thanks to his work on the hit network sitcom Family Ties, which he juggled with the sci-fi movie on an exhausting day-night-day schedule, and he had plenty of success throughout the ‘90s, too, which we’ll come to. But to millions, he is the smart-mouthed teenage kid on a skateboard, racing through time with the mad scientist – and that’s how it should be.
Fox moved very quickly from Back to the Future to Teen Wolf, a monster movie with a similar high school vibe, only without the magic. It still did pretty well regardless, requiring a sequel, and Fox followed it up with a movie that really did distil everything about the decade into 90 minutes, 1987’s The Secret to My Success.
Watching that film back now you are struck by how incredibly charismatic he is, all five feet four of him, full of the confidence of being 25 and one of the most famous movie stars in the world. It is set in a New York full of shoulder pads and huge phones and stretch limos and mirrored skyscrapers, and it’s a more entertaining movie than people remember. It did well at the box office, mostly down to the interest in the lead actor.
Fox’s popularity as a wisecracking, family fun time Hollywood youngster was what made one of his following choices, in the same year he released the second part of the Back to the Future trilogy, so surprising. In a complete volte face, he was cast in Brian De Palma’s shockingly gritty Vietnam movie Casualties of War alongside Sean Penn, a film that in no way shied away from its harrowing subject matter involving rape and the atrocities of war.
It was based on a real-life incident in which members of the US Army attacked and murdered a Vietnamese woman, and that made for a difficult sell in America. Although the movie was well reviewed and just about broke even on a budget of around $20million it was not a big success, but then those involved didn’t expect it to be, with even Fox stating at the time that it was better to fail doing something unexpected than something ordinary.
Looking back on Casualties of War, Fox told Empire: “I felt that movie was really misunderstood, it never got a fair shake.” In more recent times however the movie and its central performances from Fox and Penn have been reappraised to some degree, with the likes of Quentin Tarantino describing it as the greatest film ever made about the Vietnam war.
Fox, meanwhile, took a few years to rediscover success, which came with Peter Jackson’s acclaimed ghostly comedy The Frighteners in 1996. Following that, he hit box office gold with two Stuart Little movies and his sitcom Spin City, which ran until 2001. Sadly, it was while filming that show that he started to show signs of his advanced Parkinson’s disease.
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