Kevin Michael Doyle began his career as an actor before serving for 22 years as a Chicago police officer, stationed in the 18th District on the Near North Side.
Stage-struck since early childhood, Doyle spent nearly two decades pursuing acting as a calling, including at Second City Chicago, before scaling back his acting dreams in favor of steadier work in the police force.
“The really great thing is that not only was he a cop, but he was a cop in Second City’s district,” said former Second City producer Cheryl Sloane. “Because of that, we saw him all the time. He played jokes on everybody. He continued to be funny and really smart, and also he showed up. The thing about Kevin is, he showed up. He was there — in good times and in bad, he was a good guy.”
Doyle, 68, died of complications from pancreatic cancer on May 9 at his home in west suburban Wayne, said his daughter, Claire Bersani. He had homes in Wayne and in the Northwest Side Mayfair neighborhood.
Born in Chicago in 1957, Doyle grew up in the South Side Scottsdale area, in a house on South Kostner Avenue that was surrounded by the homes of cops, firefighters and other city workers. Growing up three doors down from him was his closest friend, Michael J. Burke, now retired as a justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois.
“Kevin is probably the most creative person I’ve ever known,” said Burke, who served as a pallbearer at Doyle’s service. “He just had a marvelous sense of humor and an unbelievable imagination, going back from when we were kids. He was constantly setting up plays and things like that.”
Burke recalled seeing the 1970 film “Patton” “probably half a dozen times.”
“He memorized the lines to ‘Patton.’ He was that type of a creative individual,” Burke said.
Doyle attended St. Bede the Venerable School for grade school, and then attended St. Rita High School before transferring to Carl Sandburg High School in Orland Park after his family moved to the south suburbs. While in high school, Doyle discovered a love both for running and the theater.
At Northern Illinois University, where Doyle earned a bachelor’s degree in political science, he acted in plays, did sketches and parodies on college radio. His college roommate? Actor Dan Castellaneta, who went on to become the voice of Homer Simpson.
After graduating from college, Doyle moved to New York to join the New Globe Theatre, a repertory company where he developed acting skills through productions written by Shakespeare, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams. Returning to Chicago, Doyle became part of Second City’s touring company and also was a cast member of Second City e.t.c., the company that helped launch John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.
In Second City e.t.c.’s 1992 spoof of a theater group’s staging of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Doyle played a folksy, tweedy, mannerly stage manager. The Tribune’s Sid Smith called Doyle “marvelous” and also “sublimely smooth” in the role.
Local plays that Doyle acted in included the 1989 staging of “I’m Not Rappaport,” at Chicago’s Briar Street Theatre.
Doyle moved to Los Angeles for a short time to write TV pilots. In mid-1990, he moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he performed in a revue in one of the casinos there, before returning to Chicago.
Doyle also appeared in TV and on the silver screen. After three auditions, he won the role of a dim police recruit in the 1987 movie “The Untouchables,” facing off opposite Sean Connery — who was nominated for an Academy Award for that role — and he also had small roles in the 1997 film “My Best Friend’s Wedding” and the TV drama “ER,” a decade later.
Amid hundreds of auditions, financial struggles and side jobs in construction and as a ditch digger, Doyle in 1997 decided on a pivot. He took the test to become a Chicago police officer, and he was hired the following year.
“You have this passion, the theater’s in your blood, you have to do it, yada, yada, yada,” Doyle told the Tribune in 2001, explaining his decision to walk away from a primary focus on acting in favor of police work. “There’s that fine line between tenacity and victimhood in the arts: How much victimhood can you stand?”
Doyle enjoyed his work as a beat cop. In the role, he wrote plenty of traffic tickets and responded to shoplifting calls, while also nabbing drug dealers and, in some cases, wrestling perpetrators to the ground. The work allowed Doyle to spend time with his family and occasionally still dabble in acting. He played police officers on episodes of TV’s “Early Edition” in 2000 and “Chicago P.D.” in 2014, among other programs. And in early 2001, he went on furlough for six weeks to play Flannery, the corrupt ward boss, in Chicago’s Famous Door Theatre’s well-reviewed political comedy “Early and Often.”
“He’s good, too, bringing a blustery meanness to his role as a corrupt ward boss,” wrote the New York Times’ Bruce Weber about Doyle in a February 2001 review of the play. “He could have been cast as a cop, which would have neatened the story — there are two policeman roles in the show — but hey, he’s an actor, which it sometimes seems as if everyone in Chicago is.”
Doyle appeared in police department training films as well, including one in which he portrayed an out-of-towner with a lost briefcase, appealing to authorities for help. With the economy on the ropes in the early 2000s, the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and an actors’ strike, Doyle told the Tribune in late 2001 that regarding acting, “it’s a good time to keep your day job.”
Doyle retired from the police department in 2020.
Outside of police work and acting, Doyle enjoyed music and had two cats, Duane and Gregg, named after two of the members of one of his favorite rock groups, the Allman Brothers Band, his daughter said. He also enjoyed exercising and spending time with family, she said.
Doyle and his wife, Mary Lou, had divorced but recently remarried. In addition to his wife and daughter, Doyle is survived by another daughter, Eve Doyle; a grandson; a brother, Jimmy; and a sister, Rosie.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
