Catherine Ringer, vocalist, songwriter, and co-founder of French new wave duo Les Rita Mitsouko, has died at age 68. Her children announced her death in a statement to AFP, confirming that she died from cancer on the night of September 14, 2026.
With her partner in music and life, Fred Chichin, Ringer made pop music feel large enough to accommodate almost anything: punk impatience, funk, cabaret, electronic experimentation, and the expressive possibilities of French chanson. A song could be funny, sensual, disconcerting, and profoundly sad within the same few minutes. Ringer gave each feeling its own physical presence, singing with a freedom that made conventional ideas of good taste seem rather timid.
Born on October 18, 1957, in Suresnes, near Paris, she was the daughter of painter Sam Ringer, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor, and an architect mother. She left school at 15 and pursued an artistic education through theatre, music, and dance. Among the formative figures in her life was Argentine dancer and choreographer Marcia Moretto, who became her teacher and collaborator. Those years onstage helped establish the connection between movement and voice that would distinguish her work with Les Rita Mitsouko. Nostalgie’s biography documents her early performances and work with Moretto.
Ringer met Chichin in 1979, beginning a partnership that would carry them from the Paris underground to international recognition. Their self-titled 1984 debut, recorded with Conny Plank, introduced a group whose appetite for experiment came with a formidable instinct for melody. As Coilhouse’s retrospective observed, Ringer’s background in avant-garde theatre remained visible in the duo’s performances and videos.
Marcia Baïla became their breakthrough. Written in remembrance of Moretto following her death from cancer, it joined the exhilaration of dance to the shock of losing someone whose life had been devoted to movement. Its popularity carried that private grief into public celebration. The song offers an especially poignant way to remember Ringer now: affection, anger, and delight sharing the same space, with no easy separation between them.
Directed by Philippe Gautier, the music video for Marcia Baïla gave the song an equally extravagant visual life, with costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler.
Watch the video below.
The duo’s collaboration with Tony Visconti on The No Comprendo in 1986 brought Andy, C’est comme ça, and Les Histoires d’A. The album won at the 1987 Victoires de la Musique, as did Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s video for C’est comme ça. These songs remain an excellent introduction to Ringer’s range: the teasing insistence of Andy, the sharp attack of C’est comme ça, and the ease with which she could make a repeated phrase feel like an argument, an invitation, or a joke.
Their creative world extended well beyond records. Jean-Luc Godard included the duo at work in his 1987 film Soigne ta droite, while collaborations brought them together with fellow musical eccentrics. Sparks joined them for Singing in the Shower, from 1988’s Marc & Robert, a meeting of artists who understood how much pleasure could be found in pop’s peculiar corners. Later, Iggy Pop appeared on My Love Is Bad, preserved alongside their other collaborations in the band’s collected catalogue.
The apparent playfulness could also carry terrible knowledge. Le Petit Train addressed the deportation trains of the Holocaust, a history bound closely to her father’s survival. Its video, filmed in Bombay, placed Ringer amid exuberant dancing while the words described people being carried toward their deaths. The tension between the music’s invitation and the lyric’s meaning remains deeply unsettling. She understood how a familiar pleasure could open an audience to something painful.
Chichin died from cancer in 2007, aged 53, the year Les Rita Mitsouko released Variéty. Ringer continued performing their songs while building a solo catalogue that included Ring n’ Roll in 2011 and Chroniques et fantaisies in 2017. With Plaza Francia, alongside Gotan Project’s Eduardo Makaroff and Christoph H. Müller, she explored tango on 2014’s A New Tango Song Book.
Her later work also returned to the intimacy of spoken language. In L’Érotisme de vivre, she performed the poetry of Alice Mendelson, accompanied by pianist Grégoire Hetzel under the direction of Mauro Gioia. The scale had changed, but the curiosity remained: another writer, another setting, another way to give words a body.
Ringer leaves music full of appetite and contradiction, open to beauty without becoming polite about it. She made eccentricity feel generous, something an audience could participate in. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, collaborators, and everyone who found freedom in her voice.
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