Who

Nerd pinup Tina Fey presided over Saturday Night Live as head writer during some of its least amusing years. She now stars on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock.

Backstory

Elizabeth Stamatina Fey grew up in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, a straight-A student who performed comedy routines with her older brother in their living room. She headed off to the University of Virginia in 1988, moving to Chicago after graduation to take night classes at the famous Second City improv troupe, a cradle of future SNL members since the days of John Belushi and Bill Murray. Fey joined the cast of Second City two years later and moved to New York to join Saturday Night Live in 1997; in 1999, she became the show's head writer, the first woman to occupy the job. After sufficiently impressing SNL boss Lorne Michaels—and losing some 35 pounds on Weight Watchers—Fey stepped in front of the camera in 2000 and began co-hosting "Weekend Update" alongside the intolerable Jimmy Fallon and, eventually, Amy Poehler. Despite the fact that the show was largely unwatchable during the several years she was head writer, she managed to fall upwards. In 2004, she penned the script and co-starred alongside Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls, which was loosely based on her experience in high school (and which was considerably better than one might have expected given her work on SNL). 

Of note

Fey now writes the NBC sitcom 30 Rock in which she also stars—alongside Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan—as the head writer of a live comedy sketch show, in what must require a Herculean leap of imagination on her part. (The show debuted at same time as Aaron Sorkin's similarly-themed and spectacularly unfunny 2006 show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.) But while 30 Rock has been loudly championed by critics and has spawned a fervent little cult following, it's largely failed to catch on with the masses, notwithstanding an Emmy win for best comedy series in 2007 and relentless celebrity cameos by the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Al Roker, Elaine Stritch, Edie Falco, Matthew Broderick, Ghostface Killah, Meredith Vieira, Nathan Lane, Stephanie March, Isabella Rossellini, Steve Buscemi, Joy Behar, Maury Povich, Whoopi Goldberg, John McEnroe, and Conan O'Brien. Fortunately for Fey, that didn't deter NBC capo Jeff Zucker from greenlighting a second—or third—season of 30 Rock.

Meantime, Fey has kept an eye on the big screen: she starred as a woman full of caustic wit but not viable eggs in 2008's Baby Mama with Poehler, and is set to write a Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle about a Hassidic punk rocker, Curly Oxide and Vic Thrill. 

Shill

Fey can be seen in print ads and commercials for American Express. 

Personal

Fey didn't lose her virginity until she was 24, but she's managed to find domestic bliss with Jeff Richmond, a composer who has worked on music for Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. They married in 2001 after dating for seven years and had their first child, Alice, in September 2005. Fey and Richmond own an apartment on West End Avenue which they paid $1.9 million for in 2005; a year later, they also purchased a 659-square-foot Upper West Side apartment around the corner for $550,000, which they use as an office.

For the record

Fey has a habit of bringing things up and then not wanting to talk about them. In 2001, she told The New Yorker that she'd once been a victim of a violent street crime, but wouldn't elaborate. And while you might think her facial scar is connected, it isn't: She says it was due to a childhood injury (dog mauling? car accident?) but again has refused to elaborate, only describing it as "kind of grim."