Tina Fey

Fey's career has an unusual shape: she was a writer and performer at Saturday Night Live before most of the audience knew her face, and she has kept the writer's job at the centre of everything since. Her Emmy shelf includes awards for writing as well as for performing, and she is the rare comic actor whose best roles were built by her.

30 Rock is the achievement. Liz Lemon runs a television sketch show and is simultaneously the most competent person in the building and the least functional, and the joke is that these are the same trait: her appetite, her conflict avoidance and her total inability to be liked and be right at once. Fey plays her without vanity and without pleading, which is why the character survived seven seasons of increasingly cartoonish plotting.

She has created three more series since, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Mr. Mayor and The Four Seasons in 2025, starring in the last of them. The film work is thinner and she seems to know it. Mean Girls is the one that broke through, and she appears in it and in the 2024 musical version as Ms. Norbury, the maths teacher doing her best. Sisters, Date Night and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot are the leading roles, and the last of those is the one that tries hardest. Voice work has suited her well, and 22 in Soul is a genuinely fine vocal performance. Ten Primetime Emmys, two Golden Globes and the Mark Twain Prize in 2010 are the official version of all this.