MY LIFE IN 10 PICTURES
From Mean Girls to Megamind, Closer looks back at Tina Fey’s storied career.
AS A teen at her Upper Darby, Pa., high school, Elizabeth Stamatina Fey was “a high-functioning nerd: editor of the school paper, in choir, but not cool.” Yet with her work on Saturday Night
Live and 30 Rock, Tina Fey, who turns 48 on May 18, has done more to make “nerdy” the new “sexy” than almost anyone. “If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: Who cares?” she’s quipped. Her selfassurance has carried over into motherhood, as raising two young daughters “has made me so tired…and so happy.” But, she admits, she still may not be as cool as we all think. “Confidence is
10 percent hard work and 90 percent delusion.”
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2013 GOLDEN LADIES Tina and her good friend from
SNL Amy Poehler were a rare female comedy team when they hosted the Golden Globes three years in a row. How does she describe their chemistry? “[We’re] the Cagney & Lacey of comedy,” she cracked.
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2016 NO JOKING “My new goal is not to explain jokes,” said Tina, after her new sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (with Ellie Kemper) courted controversy. “There’s a real culture of demanding apologies, and I’m opting out of that.”
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THE LATE ’90S FIRST ACT “It was the best job I ever had, the happiest time of my life in a lot of ways,” she’s said of her time at the famed comedy troupe Second City (with future SNL castmate Rachel Dratch). “To be living in Chicago and be paid to improvise on a nightly basis and be a part of that institution was a great joy.”
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2000 ANCHORS AWEIGH After joining SNL as a writer in 1997, she began co-anchoring Weekend Update with Jimmy Fallon. “You never have that fear and disappointment that sketch players have. And it’s the only segment where you tell America your name. So it’s career-changing.”
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2004 NICE GIRL Tina wrote and co-starred in the hit teen comedy Mean Girls, which she’s just adapted for Broadway. What does she remember most about it? “Beautiful, healthy Lindsay Lohan.”
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2007 ROCK SOLID She’d win Emmys for writing and starring on TV’s 30 Rock. But the best accolade from her days with Liz Lemon is that “I have had the pleasure of meeting a lot of women who identified with [her].”
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2008 YOU BETCHA! “That was probably the biggest thing I was ever a part of,” said Tina of her Emmywinning turn impersonating VP candidate Sarah Palin on SNL. “It was crazy!” But, all resemblances aside, she insisted it was fairly simple. “She has a Sling Blade voice… anyone can do it!”
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2010 ALL OUT She had no problem playing opposite a supervillain in Megamind, since, she quipped, “Everyone I meet, I assume, is out to get me, and that fuels my fire on a daily
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2016 ON THE SCENE All of Tina’s time on Weekend Update came in handy when she played an Afghanistan correspondent in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. “It was useful to have that fake-journalist muscle. They’d show me a page of dialogue and I would bang it out in one take. I joked, ‘Y’all are lucky I can memorize like that, or we would have been here for hours!’”
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2018 ONLY LOVE Tina has said she lost her virginity at age 24 to her husband of nearly 17 years, composer and Mean Girls Broadway collaborator
Jeff Richmond. “That’s just good, Christian values,” she quipped. “Or bein’ homely.”