Inside Tina Fey’s Family Life with Husband and Two Daughters
Tina Fey has been in the limelight since the early half of the 1990s. She met her husband, Jeff Richmond, when she was just coming up in the theatre scene in Chicago.
Fey does not reveal much about her family. But both her daughters seem to be following their parents' footsteps into the entertainment business.
Who Is Tina Fey Married To?
Tina Fey has been married to music director and composer Jeff Richmond since the turn of the century.
They met in 1993 when a young Fey and Amy Poehler were trying their luck out at the Del Close's ImprovOlympic in Chicago. Richmond was working as an in-house pianist — his first paying job.
Fey and Poehler immediately impressed Richmond with her audition. The three started hanging out backstage, and things took off from there.
In August 1994, she auditioned for The Second City after taking classes with them for two years. She became a part of the company in 1996.
Her husband followed her into the company. He started directing for the company in 1998 and did so for a few years.
Tina Fey with husband Jeff Richmond at the Emmys in 2018. (Photo: Instagram)
Fey had moved on to bigger and better things by this time. In 1997, she became the first female head writer of Saturday Night Live and moved to New York.
He followed her to New York as well and started composing for SNL.
Fey's husband has had an illustrious career in the music department, just like she has on the writing and acting front.
In addition, Richmond has composed for and directed major TV and movie productions and, not to mention, theater put-ups.
He has contributed musically to Fey's masterpiece 30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girls5Eva, etc. He was also the producer of all these shows.
As for theater, he wrote a score for William Shakespeare's Othello while at college and directed plays such as History Repaints Itself and Promise Keepers, Losers Weepers.
After seven years of dating, Fey and her husband got married on June 3, 2001, in a Greek Orthodox Ceremony.
Tina Fey and Husband Jeff Richmond's Family
Fey and Richmond took their sweet time to start a family. Their family of two became a family of three in 2005.
On September 10, 2005, Fey and Richmond welcomed their first kid, daughter Alice Zenobia Richmond. She took a 43-day maternity leave from SNL for her delivery but returned to work promptly after.
Fey initially didn't want Alice to get into acting. During an interview in June 2021, she said that when it was just Alice in the house, she was strict with her.
"[It is funny] when you have your first kid, you're like, 'oh absolutely not,' you're so strict," she said in the interview.
Alice eventually got a taste of the performing arts when she appeared as Liz Lemon on 30 Rock in 2012. Not a bad show to get your first big acting experience, and especially so when your parents created the show.
On the wedding episode of 30 Rock, Tina Fey's daughter Alice Richmond played Liz Lemon in a childhood flashback. pic.twitter.com/unjuVCM1TV — BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) August 4, 2021
Things were different with their second daughter, though.
Fey and her husband had their second kid, daughter Penelope Athena Richmond, on August 10, 2011. The SNL alum was much more lenient with Penelope when it came to letting her explore herself.
In the same interview, she revealed her approach by her saying, "[and] then when you have your second kid you're like, 'what do you want? You wanna get a tattoo? Let's do it.'"
Penelope started the same way Alice did — working on her mother's show Girlf5Eva. But it wasn't easy for her to get a job at nine years of age.
Tina Fey: “Having a teenage daughter is like having an office crush, because you’re thinking about them a lot more than they’re thinking about you.”#FallonTonight pic.twitter.com/froahmUTmh — The Tonight Show (@FallonTonight) May 21, 2021
There was a part for a 9-year-old on the show, and Fey thought, "If we don't let her audition for this, she's going to kill us."
Penelope put herself on tape, but Fey could not let her get the part right away because she feared people might talk.
So they hired another kid at first. But the pandemic did not let that kid take part in the production.
So Penelope ended up doing the job instead, and it was a "little treat for her" in the middle of the pandemic.