As she discreetly lit a cigarette, Boyle continued, "In Chicago there are North Side Irish and South Side Irish. We were North Side Irish." Being an Irish Chicagoan came with all the rites of passage for Boyle, including weekend trips with her mother to Notre Dame football games, Irish dance lessons, and braving the Windy City's frigid breezes to dance in the city's St. Patrick's Day parades. "Every St. Patrick's Day my mom would paint huge shamrocks on my face," she said. The Irish body markings have come full circle—"I've got several Irish Celtic tattoos," said Boyle, among them "an amazing Celtic cross" on her left ankle and a shamrock on her abdomen.
    "When I was younger, I would say that this much of me was Irish," she explained, making a swoop with her arms around the upper portion of her body, "and that this part of me was Italian," she continued, putting her right forearm upward. Although she claims a bit of Italian heritage through her maternal grandfather, Charles Negro, Boyle maintains that she is "seven-eighths Irish," a fact borne out by the traditions bestowed on her by her paternal grandmother, Helen O'Shaughnessy, her paternal grandfather, Jack Boyle, and her maternal grandmother, Kathleen Flynn, from whom she obtained the middle name "Flynn." Although neither side has definitively traced its Irish roots, Boyle believes that her maternal ancestors came from County Mayo, while her paternal side emigrated from Cork.
    "The Irish are a singing, storytelling people. And all of the Irish stereotypes were alive and well within my family," she said. In particular, she recalls the colorful stories told by her Great-grandfather Flynn. "That's what the holidays are for—for one person to tell the stories and another to dispute them. Isn't that the Irish way?" she asked.

In Good Company
At St. Ignatius grammar school in Chicago, Boyle's Irish heritage put her in the majority. "All of the names were Irish-McCarthy, Hartigan-" she began, "and all of us girls were very proud to be Irish." On the North Side of Chicago, being Irish was not just a trait, but a privilege. "You were lucky to be Irish," she said.
    Yet, being Irish seems to have been one of the very few privileges of Boyle's childhood. For on top of her mother's struggles to make ends meet, Boyle had to overcome her severe shyness. As an outlet, she became involved in art classes after school. Being able to express herself through art soon extended to acting workshops and roles in local theater productions during the summertime. Before long, she had landed a scholarship to the Chicago Academy for the Arts, where she studied acting.

Peak Season
Boyle's first big role came when she was cast in the 1987 miniseries Amerika, a story about a Soviet takeover of the U.S. Throughout high school she continued to win roles on television shows and in feature films. So determined was she to begin her professional acting career that she relocated to Los Angeles the day after her high school graduation. Only four months later, at the tender age of 18, she landed her breakout role, playing the vixen next door, Donna Hayward, on the critically acclaimed television series Twin Peaks.