Tracy Pollan

Tracy Jo Pollan was born on June 22, 1960, into a Jewish family on Long Island, and grew up in Woodbury, New York. She attended Syosset High School before graduating from the Dalton School in Manhattan. She trained as an actress at the Herbert Berghof Studio and the Lee Strasberg Institute.

Pollan began her screen career in the early 1980s, appearing in the drama Baby It's You in 1983. She gained widespread recognition when she was cast as Ellen Reed on the NBC sitcom Family Ties, a role she held from 1985 to 1987. Her performance on the crime drama series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2000, in which she played Harper Anderson, earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. Her film work includes Promised Land (1987), Bright Lights, Big City (1988), and A Stranger Among Us (1992). On television, she appeared in two episodes of Spin City between 1997 and 1998, and in the TV films First to Die (2003), Natalee Holloway (2009), and Justice for Natalee Holloway (2011).

Her Broadway career spanned from 1985 to 1992, during which she appeared in Pack of Lies and Jake's Women.

Pollan first met actor and activist Michael J. Fox on the set of Family Ties in 1985, where the two played a couple on screen. They reconnected during the production of Bright Lights, Big City in 1987 and married on July 16, 1988. Following her marriage, Pollan reduced her acting workload to focus on her family. She and Fox have four children: a son, Sam; twin daughters, Aquinnah Kathleen and Schuyler Frances; and a daughter, Esmé Annabelle. The family resides in Manhattan. On June 22, 2024, Pollan's daughter Schuyler married her longtime partner at Hayfield in the Catskill Mountains.

In addition to her acting career, Pollan has co-authored two cookbooks. In October 2014, she collaborated with her mother and two sisters on The Pollan Family Table, a collection of family recipes, kitchen tips, and cooking techniques, with a foreword contributed by her brother, Michael. In 2019, she co-authored Mostly Plants: 101 Delicious Flexitarian Recipes from the Pollan Family, a cookbook centered on plant-based eating.