Jack Boyle

Biography

John George Boyle, known as Jack Boyle, was a dancer, choreographer, dance director, and instructor active in Hollywood from the mid 1930s to the early 1950s. The core of his film work was a series of Monogram Pictures musicals in the 1940s. Boyle is often confused with contemporary performer and choreographer Jack Boyle (James Thomas Boyle) who by contrast worked primarily as an uncredited actor/dancer and choreographer’s assistant in the 1940s and later a choreographer for television. Jack Boyle was the son of renowned Broadway dancer, stager, and instructor Johnny Boyle and his first wife, Virginia Carolyn Harvey, who acted under the name Virginia Bennett. Jack began appearing onstage as a youngster in his father’s touring dance act, paired with and sister Jane Boyle. The family settled in Los Angeles in about 1933, where Johnny Boyle established a dance school and Jack began appearing in small film roles in which his dancing skills were often featured. As a live performer, he appeared with the popular dance bands of Fred Waring, Tommy Dorsey, Mal Hallett, and Red Nichols as well as in stage musicals. In 1940 he began teaching at the Rainbow Studios in Los Angeles, where he would continue for over a dozen years, and was best known for teaching the "flash" style of tap dancing then popular in motion pictures. He also taught at Falcon Studios from 1946 to 1949. After assisting his father on a several stage productions, Boyle took on his first major independent choreographic assignment, staging the Earl Carroll revue Vanities of 1943. This opened the door for choreographic work in feature films - the first being Melody Parade (1943) - and kicked off a fruitful period working for Monogram Pictures and on occasional assignments for Columbia and Universal. From time to time he would also make an appearance in these films. In 1944, Boyle married Billie Faye Williams, a Texas-born secretary nine years his junior, but divorced not long after. Moving up a notch to Warner Brothers, Boyle devised dances for James Cagney, a colleague and great admirer of his father Johnny Boyle, for the film The West Point Story (1950). Boyle’s work in film tapered off in the early 1950s, after which he focused on teaching and stage productions. He appeared regularly on the local Los Angeles TV program All Star Minstrels, often showing off the footwork of his students. Jack Boyle passed away at the age of 49, survived by his sister Jane and two half-sisters, Arline and Barbara.