Catherine Ringer, a singer who took the French pop world by storm in the 1980s in bold, brassy anthems that melded rock, pop, punk, funk and techno with Latin accents and dance rhythms, died on Sept. 14 in Paris. She was 68.
Her death, from cancer, was announced by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said she had “made her voice a theater and every song an expression of freedom.” He added that she was “creative, irreverent and profoundly French.”
Hers was not the France of sentimental cabaret ballads but of the country that welcomes and fuses myriad cultures, coming up with a shimmering hybrid that is unmistakably French. Ms. Ringer’s breakthrough 1984-85 hit, “Marcia Baïla,” a pungent ode to her deceased Argentine dance teacher, vibrates and shakes, an unlikely Dadaist dance tune that doubles as a funeral ode.
It sold over one million copies in France and was played endlessly on the radio. In the music video made by the producer and director Philippe Gautier, Ms. Ringer, her hairstyles making her appear by turns Asian and South American, twists, turns and mugs for the camera, declaiming the somber words in accented French against a backup of varying ethnicities.
The clip, which featured inventive outfits by the designer Jean Paul Gaultier, encapsulated the France of the 1980s, when the country under President François Mitterrand, a Socialist, was just awakening to a new multicultural identity that is now its landscape.
Ms. Ringer (pronounced RAINH-jeay) assumed the multiculturalism defiantly and precociously, down to the whimsical name she chose for the duo of herself and her partner, the scowling guitarist Fred Chichin: Les Rita Mitsouko. It combines a Japanese-sounding word — the name of a Guerlain perfume — with her own fascination for things Latin.
They made seven studio albums before Mr. Chichin’s death in 2007, with plangent hits in France like “Andy” and “C’est comme ça,” and sometimes singing with trans-Atlantic acts like Iggy Pop and the pop duo Sparks.
Equal parts Édith Piaf, Maria Callas, the Egyptian megastar Umm Kalthoum, Lou Reed and the French singer-songwriter-poet Georges Brassens, she was “superpowerful,” the French rock critic Philippe Manoeuvre commented on Franceinfo radio station after her death.
“She had two or three octaves hidden away in her throat,” Mr. Manoeuvre said. “Onstage, you never knew what she was going do, what would come into her head.”
The mix of styles and cultures was fundamental to the identity of Les Rita Mitsouko and to Ms. Ringer, who had variously been a dancer; a theater, television and music hall performer; and a porn actress.
Between 1976 and 1982, Ms. Ringer, in her late teens and early 20s and living in Paris’s edgy 19th arrondissement, was in some 20 pornographic films, an aspect of her past she was never ashamed of.
“Nobody forced me to do it. You’ve got to be a little bit bizarre to do that kind of thing,” she once told an interviewer. “You’ve got to be courageous, suck up your resentments. Porn was like my military service.”
After she had become famous in the mid-1980s, rivals were only too happy to bring it up, to try to embarrass her. Ms. Ringer held her ground. In a notorious television exchange in 1986, she handily swatted down the French pop icon Serge Gainsbourg.
“I was strictly hard-core,” she said on the program “Mon Zénith à moi.” “I wouldn’t do soft.”
“You’re a tart, a whore,” Mr. Gainsbourg responded, clearly having had a few too many drinks.
“No, no,” Ms. Ringer responded, unperturbed. “It’s not the same thing. It’s not the same job. I wasn’t taking in customers.”
“Ah, you’re disgusting!” Mr. Gainsbourg continued, looking away.
“Sure, disgusting, whatever. That’s modern life,” Ms. Ringer said calmly. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
Catherine Ringer was born in the Paris suburb of Suresnes on Oct. 18, 1957, the older of two children of Sam Ringer, a Holocaust survivor of Polish-Jewish origin who came to Paris after World War II to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts, and Jeannine (Ettlinger) Ringer, an architect. She recounted her father’s story — as a survivor of nine Nazi death camps — in the 2000 song “C’était un homme” (“He Was a Man”).
She left school at 15, began a career on the Paris stage by the age of 18, acting in productions of the Franco-British actor Michael Lonsdale; made several television appearances; and danced with her teacher Marcia Moretto, the dedicatee of “Marcia Baïla,” at the Café de la Gare in Paris.
She met Mr. Chichin in 1979 at a rehearsal in Montreuil, outside Paris. He was a lean, mustachioed guitarist who had just come out of the prison at Fresnes, incarcerated on drug charges. They became inseparable, artistic outlaws open to every kind of experiment.
“Sharing the same taste for cheekiness, the offbeat, and for jagged contrasts, the diva with the kind of Cubist cockiness, and the lanky dandy with the affect of a pimp, were first noticed by a handful of stage aficionados,” Le Monde wrote in 2019.
Their first album, “Don’t Forget the Night” (1981), was a bust. “Marcia Baïla” changed everything. “I was struck by a style that didn’t resemble anything else in that period,” Mr. Gaultier, the fashion designer, told Le Monde.
The 1980s and early 1990s, with albums like “The No Comprendo” and “Système D,” were their heyday. The director Jean-Luc Godard included her in his 1987 film “Soigne ta Droite” (“Keep Your Right Up”). After Mr. Chichin’s death, she continued to tour, playing her old hits and new songs, sometimes with her son by Mr. Chichin, the guitarist Raoul Chichin.
He survives her, as do her daughters Ginger Romàn and Simone Ringer, also by Mr. Chichin. The two “built one of the most singular adventures in the history of French music: immediately identifiable, but difficult to classify,” Rolling Stone wrote after her death.
In interviews, she refused to be pinned down, either to a style or to an outlook on life. “There’s no unhappiness,” she told Le Monde four years after Mr. Chichin’s death. “There’s only life.”
Daphné Anglès contributed reporting.