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With the grand final for 2026 just a few hours away, it’s time for us to remember those who walked on the Eurovision Song Contest stage before, sometimes Eurovision winners, and who (since the last Contest) are sadly no longer with us. What is Eurovision if not one big family?
Mehmet Horoz was a veteran Turkish bassist, vocalist and producer who, as part of the four-piece pop group Beş Yıl Önce, On Yıl Sonra (“Five Years Ago, Ten Years Later”), represented Turkey at the Eurovision Song Contest 1984 in Luxembourg with the folk-tinged number Halay, finishing 12th with 37 points — at that point the best result Turkey had ever achieved at the contest. Born in Istanbul in 1940, Horoz had begun his professional career in 1960 playing bass with Somer Soyata ve Arkadaşları, before joining the Yurdaer Doğulu Orchestra in 1965 and then the celebrated Durul Gence 5, one of the most influential Turkish bands of the 1960s. In 1982 he was brought together with Nilgün Onatkut, Atakan Ünüvar and Şebgün Tansel to form Beş Yıl Önce, On Yıl Sonra, an ABBA-style harmony act built around medleys of Turkish pop and classical hits. The group had narrowly missed out on Eurovision in 1983 with Atlantis before winning the national final the following year, and continued recording into the 1990s, collaborating with stars including Ajda Pekkan and Nükhet Duru before releasing a final album in 2001. He died in the early hours of 13 June 2025 after being taken into intensive care, aged 85, and was buried in Bodrum the same day.
Inge Brück was a German singer and actress who represented Germany at the Eurovision Song Contest 1967 in Vienna with Anouschka, a gentle schlager ballad written by Hans Blum that finished in joint eighth place. Born in Mannheim in 1936 to a concert singer and a pianist, she began her career with the Erwin Lehn Dance Orchestra and scored a 1957 hit with “Peter, komm heut’ abend zum Hafen,” a German version of “Green Door”. After Eurovision she turned increasingly to acting, starring in the title role of the popular ZDF series Miss Molly Mill as a cleaning lady and amateur detective. From the 1970s onwards she devoted herself to performing songs with Christian content, co-founding the initiative Künstler für Christus alongside fellow Eurovision veterans Katja Ebstein and Peter Horton. She died in Meschede on 8 September 2025, aged 88.
Jarkko Antikainen was one half of the Finnish pop duo Jarkko ja Laura, alongside his future wife Laura Ruotsalo. The pair first broke through in 1966 with “Meidän laulumme” and went on to record popular Finnish-language versions of international hits including The Windmills of Your Mind and Cinderella Rockefella. In 1969 they narrowly beat Katri Helena in the Finnish national selection by just a few thousand postcard votes, and went on to represent Finland at the Eurovision Song Contest in Madrid with Kuin silloin ennen (“Like in Those Times”), finishing in twelfth place with six points. The duo married in 1975 and continued to record and perform together until the mid-1970s, after which Jarkko turned to photography and took over the running of his family’s textile companies, Bombus and Brenda. In later years he occasionally performed alongside Laura and acted as a mentor to entrepreneurs. He died on 18 October 2025 at the age of 75.
Alice and Ellen Kessler, known professionally as the Kessler Twins, represented West Germany at the Eurovision Song Contest 1959 in Cannes with Heute Abend wollen wir tanzen geh’n (“Tonight We Want to Go Dancing”), finishing in eighth place and becoming the first duo ever sent by Germany to the contest. Born in Nerchau, Saxony in 1936, the identical twins escaped East Germany with their family in 1952 and went on to become one of post-war Europe’s most glamorous variety acts. Between 1955 and 1960 they were headliners at the Lido in Paris, where they met Elvis Presley, and they later moved to Italy to star on RAI’s Studio Uno, where their synchronised legwork earned them the nickname “le gemelle Kessler” — and, in the Italian press, “the Nation’s Legs”. They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, graced the cover of Life magazine, shared stages with Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire, and continued performing into their eighties, including a 2015–16 musical tour through Berlin, Munich and Vienna. The sisters, who lived in connecting apartments in Grünwald near Munich and met every day at noon for lunch, chose to end their lives together by assisted dying on 17 November 2025, aged 89. Their ashes were placed in a single urn alongside those of their mother and their dog.
Fanny Biascamano was a French singer born in Sète, in the Hérault, who first found fame at the age of 12 with a televised cover of Édith Piaf’s L’Homme à la moto on TF1’s variety show Sacrée Soirée — a performance so striking that the single went on to sell over three million copies in France and Canada. She released her debut album the following year and was just 17 years old when France 2 internally selected her to represent France at the Eurovision Song Contest 1997 in Dublin with Sentiments songes, a Jean-Paul Dréau composition that finished in a respectable seventh place with 95 points, including the maximum twelve from Estonia, Norway and Poland. After Eurovision, Fanny stepped back from the spotlight to focus on her studies, returning to the stage a decade later and touring internationally in 2008 with a programme of Édith Piaf covers. She released four studio albums in total and in later years became a writer, publishing three books including two cookbooks devoted to the cuisine of southern France. She died on 27 December 2025 after a battle with cancer, aged 46.
Wolfgang Heichel was a founding member and lead voice of the German Eurodisco group Dschinghis Khan, who represented Germany at the Eurovision Song Contest 1979 in Jerusalem with their flamboyant self-titled track Dschinghis Khan, finishing fourth with 86 points including the maximum twelve from Denmark, France, Monaco and Spain. Born in Meißen in 1950, Heichel had initially trained for four semesters as a dentist before abandoning his studies to pursue music, playing with Berlin bands including Black Birds, Junction and Blue Heaven. The Eurovision entry, written and produced by the prolific team of Ralph Siegel and Bernd Meinunger, topped the West German charts and went to number one in Israel, while the group’s follow-up Moskau went on to top the Australian charts for six weeks after being adopted as the theme for Seven Network’s coverage of the 1980 Olympics. After the group’s first dissolution in 1985 and a 2005 reunion, Heichel later led his own incarnation of Dschinghis Khan and devoted himself to humanitarian and cultural causes, becoming an official cultural ambassador for Mongolia and receiving the country’s Medal of Friendship, its highest honour for a foreign citizen. He was found dead at his home on 20 January 2026, aged 75, his death coming as a surprise after what his family described as a period of marked improvement following recent health challenges.
Helen Micallef was a pioneering Maltese singer who, alongside Joe Cutajar as the duo Helen and Joseph, became the first Maltese woman to perform on the Eurovision stage when they represented Malta at the Eurovision Song Contest 1972 in Edinburgh with the love ballad L-Imħabba. Born in Birkirkara in 1950, the fourth of eight children and the elder sister of Renato (who would go on to represent Malta in 1975), she began singing at the age of ten and joined the band The Four Links at fourteen, going on to win the Malta Song Festival in 1968 with Tu ora capirai. Cutajar had actually won the 1972 national selection as a solo artist — with Helen finishing third with her own song Għasfur taċ-ċomb — but the broadcaster decided to send them as a duet, and the pair, dressed in vibrant red polka dots, finished joint last in Edinburgh with 48 points under a voting system that guaranteed every song at least 34. After marrying, Helen stepped back from performing to focus on family life, but she reunited with Cutajar in 2022 to mark fifty years since their Eurovision moment, two years before his own death in March 2024. She is remembered as a pioneer of Malta’s modern music scene, and is survived by her three daughters, three grandchildren and a great-grandson. She died on 4 February 2026, aged 75.
Zoya Dorodova was a member of the celebrated Russian folk-pop ensemble Buranovskiye Babushki — the “Buranovo Grannies” — who represented Russia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku with the warm-hearted, English-and-Udmurt-language anthem Party for Everybody, beating former winner Dima Bilan in the Russian national selection and ultimately finishing second to Loreen’s Euphoria with 259 points. Born in 1940 in Udmurtia, Dorodova lived a quintessentially rural Soviet working life long before her unlikely brush with international stardom: she worked for many years as a baker at the Buranov bakery, later as a milkmaid on a collective farm, and after marrying moved to the village of Babino where she worked as a cook and head of the school cafeteria. The grannies famously pledged the proceeds of their music to build a new church in their village of Buranovo, and continued to tour and perform folk music together for years after Eurovision. Her death at the age of 85, following a long illness, was announced by the head of the Malopurginsky district on 21 February 2026 — making her the third member of the original Eurovision line-up to pass away in recent years.
Marinella, born Kyriaki Papadopoulou in Thessaloniki in 1938 to a family of Greek refugees from Constantinople, was one of the towering voices of twentieth-century Greek popular music, widely revered as “the Great Lady of Greek Song”. She was the very first artist to represent Greece at Eurovision, performing the breezy bouzouki-driven Krasi, Thalassa ke t’ Agori Mou (“Wine, sea and my boyfriend”) at the 1974 contest in Brighton — the same evening that ABBA won with Waterloo — and finishing eleventh with seven points, having been drafted in after Greek rock band Nostradamos were barred from competing over a scandal. Across a career spanning nearly seven decades and 66 solo albums, she collaborated with the giants of Greek composition including Mikis Theodorakis, Manos Hadjidakis, Vassilis Tsitsanis and Stavros Xarchakos, and was one half of the most celebrated duet in Greek music history alongside her first husband Stelios Kazantzidis. Later highlights included a triple-platinum live album with Kostas Hatzis in 1976, a duet tour with George Dalaras in 2003, and a performance at the closing ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics. On 25 September 2024 she suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke while performing at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, collapsing on stage during the song Words Are Unnecessary; she was hospitalised for four months and never fully recovered, dying peacefully at home on 28 March 2026 at the age of 87.
Björgvin Halldórsson, popularly known in Iceland simply as “Bo”, was one of his country’s most prolific and best-loved pop singers, with his voice appearing on more than 500 Icelandic recordings across a career that spanned almost six decades. Crowned Iceland’s “Popstar of the Year” at the age of 18 in 1969 while fronting the band Ævintýri, he went on to perform with a roll-call of Icelandic acts including Brimkló, Hljómar, Ðe lónlí blú bojs and the rock’n’roll outfit HLH. He had tried to win the Icelandic national selection on six previous occasions before being internally chosen by RÚV to represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest 1995 in Dublin, where he performed the romantic ballad Núna (“Now”), finishing 15th with 31 points. Alongside his solo work he was one of the first artists to popularise gospel music in Iceland, hosted the long-running Jólagestir Björgvins Christmas concerts, and was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon in 2011. He passed on the Eurovision baton to his daughter Svala, who represented Iceland in 2017 with Paper; his son Krummi is also a singer. He died on 9 April 2026, just one week short of his 75th birthday.
Romuald Figuier, known simply as Romuald, was a French chansonnier from Saint-Pol-de-Léon in Brittany who holds the distinction of being the only francophone singer to have appeared as a lead artist at Eurovision three times — and, remarkably, for two different countries. He made his contest debut representing Monaco in Copenhagen in 1964 with the elegant ballad Où sont-elles passées?, finishing third with 15 points. Five years later he returned for Luxembourg in Madrid with Catherine, placing 11th, and in 1974 he sang for Monaco once again at the Brighton contest with Celui qui reste et celui qui s’en va, finishing joint fourth alongside the United Kingdom and Luxembourg. Outside Eurovision he was a fixture on the international song-festival circuit, representing Andorra in Rio, Luxembourg in Sopot, and France in Chile, where his 1973 entry Laisse-moi le temps won the Best Singer prize at Viña del Mar; Paul Anka subsequently bought the rights and rewrote it in English as Let Me Try Again, which was famously recorded by Frank Sinatra. In later life Romuald moved into composing for film, theatre and other artists, releasing his final album Congo in 1984. He died in Cannes on 12 May 2026, three days after his 88th birthday.
Sophie Garel, born Lucienne Gabrielle Garcia in Oran in French Algeria in 1942, was a familiar voice and face of French radio and television for more than four decades, but for Eurovision audiences she will be remembered as the female half of the Luxembourg duo who performed the gentle chanson Nous vivrons d’amour (“We Will Live on Love”) with her fellow Radio Luxembourg presenter Chris Baldo at the 1968 Eurovision Song Contest in London, finishing 11th of 17 with five points. The contest, held at the Royal Albert Hall, was historic as the first Eurovision ever broadcast in colour and was ultimately won by Spain’s Massiel, beating Cliff Richard by a single point. Garel had begun her career as a young presenter at Télé Oran in 1960 before the exodus of French Algerians brought her to Marseille and then to Paris in 1967, where she joined the Rue Bayard studios of what would become RTL. There she formed an enduring on-air partnership with the broadcaster Fabrice that ran for more than thirty years, often playing her comic alter ego “Mémène”, before later joining Laurent Ruquier’s panel shows in the late 2000s. She died on 14 May 2026, aged 84.
