“It was death that murdered him.” Singer Catherine Ringer, of the legendary Rita Mitsouko duo, died of cancer on Monday, September 14, at the age of 68, definitively closing the story of this French rock duo that she formed with her companion Fred Chichin, who died in 2007.
“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 said in a press release sent to AFP on Tuesday.
From Rita Mitsouko to a solo career
With Fred Chichin, Catherine Ringer founded one of the most explosive groups in French rock in the early 1980s.
Their hits – “Andy”, “C’est comme ça”, “Love stories end badly” and especially “Marcia Baïla” (1984), a heartbreaking anthem about the death of the Argentine dancer Marcia Moretto from cancer – have spanned the ages.
“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,” underlines the press release from her family.
Fred Chinchin, soul mate and traveling companion
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.
In 1986, on the set of Canal+, she stood up to Serge Gainsbourg who showered her with insults by throwing her short past in porn back in her face.
It was in 1979 that she met Fred Chichin who would become her soul mate and her traveling companion within the Rita family for several decades.
After the death of Fred Chichin, also killed by a devastating cancer at the age of 53, Catherine Ringer initially left the stage before returning little by little, continuing to perpetuate the Rita legacy, and then cultivating a solo career on the sidelines.
In 2019, at the Philharmonie de Paris, she celebrated on stage the 40th anniversary of her meeting with Fred Chichin, without ever hiding her inconsolable sorrow.
On each anniversary of her death, Catherine Ringer said she felt “a total lack of energy, as if everything had been sucked out of me.” “I have to take a little break at this point,” she confided on France Inter at the start of 2024.
“It is also not a goal in life to be happy. Life is made up of ups and downs. And if there were no downs, there would be no ups, it would be flat,” she added.
“I like to improvise in rhyme”
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.
A singer committed in particular against the far right, Catherine Ringer had, in 2024, revisited La Marseillaise to celebrate the inclusion of the right to abortion in the Constitution.
“Let us march and sing this pure law in the Constitution,” she sang while singing the national anthem in Paris in front of the Ministry of Justice.
It only took a few notes to recognize his voice. A few seconds on stage to capture this energy that belonged only to her. From Rita Mitsouko to her solo career, free, daring, inimitable, Catherine Ringer will have left her mark on French music”, greeted the President of the National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet on X.
In 2023, Catherine Ringer auctioned around a hundred works by her father, Sam Ringer, a little-known painter who survived nine concentration camps. “He transmitted his life force to me,” she told AFP.
With AFP
