Catherine Ringer, the voice of Rita Mitsouko, died at 68

It is the disappearance of an icon of French song. Catherine Ringer, famous voice of Rita Mitsouko, died at the age of 68, her family announced to AFP on Tuesday September 15.

“It is with immense sadness that the family and loved ones of Catherine Ringer announce her death, lost to devastating cancer on the night of September 14, 2026,” her children wrote in a press release. “A major French artist, half of Rita Mitsouko, Catherine Ringer has marked several generations with her voice and her songs, her great freedom and her singularity,” continues her family.

In the early 1980s, she formed one of the most explosive groups in French rock, Les Rita Mitsouko, with her companion, the guitarist Fred Chichin, whom she met in 1979. Their hits – Andy, C'est comme ça, Les Histoires d'A and especially Marcia Baïla (1984), a heartbreaking anthem about the death of the Argentine dancer Marcia Moretto, who died of cancer – have spanned the ages.

Born on October 18, 1957 in the Paris suburbs of a painter father, a former Jewish deportee, and an architect mother, Catherine Ringer left school at 15, multiplying her artistic experiences and even venturing into porn, a past she never denied. It was in 1979 that she met Fred Chichin, who would become her traveling companion within the Rita family until his death in 2007, also lost to a devastating cancer at the age of 53.

After the death of Fred Chichin, Catherine Ringer initially left the stage before returning little by little, continuing to perpetuate the Rita legacy. On each anniversary of her death, she said she felt "a total lack of energy, as if everything had been sucked out of [her]". “There, I need to take a little break at this point,” she confided on France Inter at the start of 2024. “It’s not a goal in life to just be happy either. Life is made up of ups and downs. And if there were no downs, there would be no ups, it would be flat.”

She released her first solo album, Ring n'roll, in 2011. It was nominated for the 2012 Victoires de la Musique in the "Best Album of Songs" category and Catherine Ringer won the Victory for "Best Female Artist" that year.

In 2019, at the Philharmonie de Paris, she celebrated on stage the 40th anniversary of her meeting with Fred Chichin. More recently, she had also recited poetry on stage, confiding to AFP, in 2023, that she had “always loved the rhythm of words”. “I like to improvise in rhyme, even in the middle of a concert,” she said.