Butterflies in the Rain: To Ireland, From Hollywood - Traveling a Starlet's Ancestral Trail Part II

"The Brown family, three brothers and a sister, applied themselves to the task of finding this unknown [starlet] through searching the internet's genealogy sites, researched every repository they could, visited film museums, and contacted every expert they could find to restore this golden leaf in their family tree. Because of their commitment, there is now an extensive Regina Doyle filmography online, and a family "backstory" that is no longer incomplete . . . . [S]hare how they discovered Regina, and the film Bashful Whirlwind (1925) . . . so we can learn who Regina Doyle was."

-Richard Adkins, former President Hollywood Heritage Museum.

Butterflies in the Rain: To Ireland, From Hollywood (Traveling a Starlet's Ancestral Trail) is the companion volume to Butterflies in the Rain: A Tale of Old Hollywood (2024). The story tracks the life, art, and ancestry of silent-film starlet, Regina Doyle from the New World to the Old: across a continent, an ocean, nine generations and four centuries. This it does while searching the origins of the "pantomime acting tradition" and its "bandit hero" in the old gypsy minstrel tradition of Ireland, which so deeply inform the silent-film era, the American western, its chivalrous, charismatic cowboy and his sweetheart of the sage. A silent-film era biography, memoir, and roots-saga, Butterflies in the Rain (vol two) ends as it begins, in Hollywood: like a "Lathan loop" of celluloid spooling through its narrative projector.