Irene Boyle

Biography

Irene Boyle slipped into the world sometime in the early 1890s and, before the decade could wrinkle, slipped straight onto flickering screens. In 1913 she joined Kalem’s troupe of daredevils and dreamers, debuting opposite Stuart Holmes in *The Game Warden*. Over the next ten whirlwind years she clocked forty-two shorts and features—melodramas, slapstick romps, shadowy crime yarns—jumping studios the way other people change trains: Imp, Rex, Fox. Audiences of the nickelodeon age remember her best as Marcella, the storekeeper’s headstrong daughter, dodging moonshiners in 1913’s *The Pursuit of the Smugglers*, and again as Mollie Powell, racing a coal-town deadline beside George Walsh in Dell Henderson’s 1920 thriller *The Dead Line*. Her final curtain fell in 1923 when she stepped before Ralph Ince’s camera one last time, trading quips with Joe King as the sharp-eyed Miss Ferris in *Counterfeit Love*. Then the lights came up, the projectors cooled, and Boyle—silent-era workhorse, pioneer of a brand-new art—walked off the set and into history.