Actor Michael J. Fox‘s mother, Phyllis Evelyn Fox, died on Sept. 24. She was 92. The actor joked about how his mother did not think it was a good idea for him to star in Back to the Future during a New York Comic Con panel on Saturday to celebrate the franchise.
Since the panel took place about two weeks after his mother’s death, Fox, 61, shared a story about how his mother thought he would be too tired to make both Back to the Future and Family Ties. “I was 23 years old, and I called her, she was in Canada, and I said, ‘They want me to do this Steven Spielberg movie, but I have to do it at night and I have to do Family Ties in the daytime,’” Fox recalled, reports PEOPLE. “And she said, ‘You’ll be too tired.’”
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Fox told his mother that he lived for “this kind of tired” and assured her he would be fine. “To this day – well, till two weeks ago – my mother thought it was a really bad idea for me to do Back to the Future. She loved the movie, [but she was right], I got tired,” Fox said.
Phyllis was born in Winnipeg in 1929 and was raised in British Columbia, according to her obituary. While working for her local paper, she met a young solder, William “Bill” Nelson Fox at the Vancouver Wireless Station. They married in 1950 and had six children, including Mark, who died as an infant. Bill’s service took them across Canada before they finally settled in Vancouver after Bill retired. Bill died in 1990.
“It’s impossible to overstate the esteem in which she was held, not only by her family but by all who met her,” her obituary reads. “All agreed that her premarital monogram PEP was an apt one. She was the embodiment of PEP but with substance. Bill passed in 1990, which was a blow, but she doubled down on her commitment to her family and community.” Phyliss served on the board of the Michael J. Fox Theatre in Burnaby and helped raise awareness for diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. Her family asks for donations to be made in her memory to diabetes and Parkinson’s disease organizations, as well as Burnaby General Hospital, BC Children’s Hospital, and Canuck Place.
Elsewhere during the NYCC panel, Fox shared why he is optimistic today, in spite of the struggles he faces. “Well, in the last year I’ve broken my cheek, my eye socket, my hand, my elbow… my shoulder. I had a rough year of getting beat up,” Fox said, with Christopher Lloyd by his side. “But that was really cool because it made me realize… with gratitude, it’s sustainable.”
“If you can find something to be grateful for if you can find something and say, ‘Well, that’s good,’… It’ll always get better… I’m very optimistic,” Fox continued. “I’d say optimism is thinking that things are more likely to get better than they are to get worse. If you believe in that, and you are grateful for it, that’ll sustain you the rest of your life.”
