Ric Evans Jilline Ringle in her signature "Mondo Mangia" at City Theatre in 2001. Click photo for larger image.

Jilline Ringle was a lot of woman. "The six-foot red-haired Amazon whom all men desire" was her self-description of choice, and she was equally expansive in talk, talent and heart. Just 40, she died Monday evening in a Philadelphia hospital.

A New Jersey native based in Philadelphia, she became well-known to Pittsburgh in the last four years, during which she performed in six productions at City Theatre, three of them sold-out runs of her signature, one-woman cabaret, "Mondo Mangia." It was a combination of comedy, autobiography, song, back-fence philosophy and Italian wisdom handed down through the female line, during which she also cooked and served the audience a pasta dish. The show inspired consistent sellouts, return visits for those who could get seats and a handful of marriage proposals.

She inspired intense affection even in those who did not know her. As City artistic director Tracy Brigden said yesterday, "it was partly because she played herself on stage: she revealed herself."

What City audiences in the past two years did not know was that Ms. Ringle was fighting breast cancer, undergoing radiation treatment even while performing last year as the statuesque redheaded French Marquesa in "Cafe Puttanesca."

She did another popular one-woman show at City in 2003, "La Dolce Vita: Movie Songs of the 1960s," in which she appeared as Anita Ekberg, Melina Mercouri, Jayne Mansfield and Claudia Cardinale. Last spring City workshopped her and Suzanne O'Donnell's "Time Out! With Didi & Rose" and just last week it announced that she would return next season with "Shut Up & Kiss Me," a cabaret salute to femmes fatales of the mid-century with appropriate, over-the-top outfits for each.

"Everybody thought Jilline was such a force of nature, she would overcome [the cancer]," said Brigden. But just as she was to leave for Florida a month ago to fulfill a dream by playing Josie in Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten" at the Orlando Shakespeare Festival, her doctors discovered her cancer had metastasized.

Ric Evans Jilline Ringle (right) as the French Marquesa, with (from left) Lenora Nemetz, Megan Hilty and Dan Krell, in "Cafe Puttanesca" at City Theatre, 2004. Click photo for larger image.

She was heartbroken to cancel, her father, Charles Ringle, said yesterday. But the Orlando theater listed her as an understudy, to keep her connected to the show.

Her treatments went well and she stayed bright and lively until Thursday, when she began to decline rapidly. The cause of death was pneumonia.

In a 2002 interview, Ringle described her father as "amedigon" -- street Italian for non-Italian -- "but you should always choose Italian," so he did. Her mother's parents were both born in Italy, and Italian was the ethnicity of her childhood in Fairfield, north New Jersey, where she was born, and which she described as "not really a town, more of a development, where everybody's name ended in a vowel."

Her father said her performing began early, "probably at age 5. She used to sit in the living room, listening to all my show albums. Then she and [her brother] Scott would make up their own plays and perform them." In West Essex Regional High School, already close to six feet tall, she played the title role in "Auntie Mame" and the Mother Abbess in "The Sound of Music."

She went to Bryn Mawr College as an English major, but theater was her goal. On graduation, she became part of the group that started Philadelphia's Arden Theater Company. That was her graduate school, she said: "We all learned on the fly."

But as she approached 30 she said she started to get less work, partly because she stood 6 feet 2 inches -- "and she wore heels besides," her father said. "She was proud of it."

	Ric Evans Jilline Ringle in her Anita Ekberg mode in "La Dolce Vita" at City Theatre, 2003. Click photo for larger image.

Her response was to create her own work in solo shows. She spent many summers at the Chalfonte Hotel in Cape May, N.J., where she developed her cabaret style. She called it "concept cabaret." "La Dolce Vita" was the first, developed in 1995, three years before "Mondo Mangia." Next came "For Me, Formidable" (which she called "a dumb 1950s movie musical parody"), "Come Fly With Me" ("80 songs from 50 countries") and "Shut Up & Kiss Me."

There were more in recent years, such as "Always a Lady: A Celebration of Funny Women for the Holidays," co-written and performed with her frequent partner, the diminutive Jen Childs. In December she did her "Christmas Cabaret" at Cape May Stage.

In her shows, she mined her own life. She came on strong, willing to do just about anything to entertain, intercutting songs and memories with self-deflating barbs and pop culture free association. Behind her cultural tour guide patter and personal reminiscence, you saw her very big heart. She was someone you'd love to look through a photo album with.

Her solo cabarets were generally set in 1962, before she was born. She drew inspiration from all things '60s, including vintage record albums, TV shows and thrift shops.

She was Catholic, which she said was "in my blood. Do I go to church? No. Do I agree with the pope? No. But do I make novenas? Yes. And do I know everything about every saint who ever lived? Yes!"

Ms. Ringle also performed with others. A favorite in Philadelphia, she played in "Godspell," "Side by Side by Sondheim" and headlined as Mae West in "Vaudeville for the Holidays." She was nominated for three Barrymore Awards (Philadelphia's Tony) and was the recipient of Philadelphia City Paper's "Philly's Coolest Actress" award. At Cape May Stage, she did the daunting "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," most famously done solo by Lily Tomlin.

Pittsburgh was her first conquest beyond Philadelphia and Cape May. Next came Hartford, where she did "Mondo Mangia," and Orlando.

Ms. Ringle never married, partly because, as she told the Post-Gazette in 2002, "It's hard to be in a relationship when you're home for a total of two and a half months a year." Instead, she made fast friends, to whom she was intensely loyal.

One such was Pittsburgh native Amy Friedman, a Philadelphia friend since both had sung and acted together at Bryn Mawr. "I lit her in 'Lysistrata.' 'Mauve and flattering pinks, darling,' she said, and I said, 'of course' ... .

"Our college president arranged for Jilline to meet Katharine Hepburn, and at a reunion she regaled us with an impression and a funny story about Hepburn holding court in her New York brownstone."

Friedman said Ms. Ringle was with her the night her son was born, leaving only to do a show, then coming back. To her own nephew and niece, she was known as Aunt Piggy.

"She loved Pittsburgh," Friedman said. "The guys in the shop at City Theatre just sent her a Basket of Pittsburgh and we laughed about why there wasn't any Iron City or pierogies in it."

Laura McCarthy of Prime Stage said Ms. Ringle was "the strongest person I have ever known. She would oftentimes lend you some of that strength just by looking at you."

Many Pittsburghers would travel to see Ms. Ringle's shows in Phildelphia or Cape May, such as Edna Enelow, with whom she had a long-running Scrabble competition. Enelow was also one of those who returned to see her Pittsburgh shows again and again, bringing groups of others.

A particularly close friend was Barbara Russell, another tall woman comedienne of Italian descent who also liked to shop at Gabriels. What impressed her the most, said Russell yesterday, besides her friend's "generosity of spirit" was that "she was constantly working on a new original show. She would write several a year, and even with 'Mondo Mangia,' she was constantly improving, making it current ... Jilline never did anything mediocre."

Ms. Ringle is survived by her father and younger brothers Scott and Jeffrey .

Funeral arrangements are by the Ippolito-Stellato Funeral Home, 7 Two Bridges Road, Fairfield, N.J. Viewing will be Friday, 4 to 8 p.m., with a church service at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Thomas More Church, Hollywood Avenue, Fairfield.

	City Theatre Everyone in Pittsburgh knew Jilline Ringle from this billboard advertising "La Dolce Vita" at City Theatre.. Click photo for larger image.