Tina Fey turns 56 today, and for Cosmos Philly, the date is worth noting for reasons that go beyond celebrity trivia.
Before Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, Mean Girls, and her national comedy career, Fey was Elizabeth Stamatina Fey from Upper Darby. Upper Darby High School lists Tina Fey on its Alumni Wall of Fame as a member of the Class of 1988.
The Greek family line comes through Fey’s mother, Jeanne G. Fey, who died in 2024. She was born Zenobia Gustandina Athena Xenakes in Piraeus, Greece, in December 1930, and emigrated as an infant to Philadelphia, where her parents, Constantine and Vasiliki, had met and married. Jeanne married Donald Fey in May 1961 at St. Demetrios Church in Upper Darby.
That family history later became part of a wider public story through PBS’s Finding Your Roots. In the episode “Ancient Roots”, the program traced Fey’s Greek ancestry and identified a fifth great-grandfather who survived a massacre and became a figure in the Greek War of Independence.
For a Greek-American publication in the Philadelphia region, that is enough to make the birthday worth a mention. Not because every famous person with a Greek name needs to be turned into a community symbol, but because the details are real: Stamatina inside “Tina,” Piraeus inside a Philadelphia family story, and Upper Darby inside a national comedy career.
Fey has not built her public identity primarily around being Greek-American. In a 2003 New Yorker profile by Virginia Heffernan, Fey joked, “I’ve said a few things about being Greek, and now every Greek organization wants to adopt me.”
Cosmos Philly does not need to “claim” Tina Fey. It can simply recognize that one of America’s best-known comedy voices has a real Upper Darby beginning and a real Greek family line running through her story.
That is the stronger angle. Not celebrity worship. Not ethnic flag-waving. Just a local and Greek-American footnote that happens to belong to one of the most influential comedy careers of the last three decades.
From the Cosmos Philly archive:
In 2016, Cosmos Philly covered Tina Fey’s scholarship announcement in memory of her father. Read that story here.