Songwriter Alan Bergman (“The Way We Were,” “The Windmills Of Your Mind”) Dead At 99

Alan Bergman, half of a hugely successful songwriting duo with his late wife Marilyn, has died. Variety reports that Bergman passed away at home in Los Angeles on Thursday. No cause of death has been reported, but Bergman was 99 years old. When you make it that long, you don’t really need a reason for leaving.

Alan Bergman grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, and he studied music at UNC Chapel Hill and UCLA. He got his start directing television and writing songs for a Philadelphia TV station in the early ’50s, and he moved to Los Angeles to write songs full-time. In the late ’50s, Alan met his future wife Marilyn Katz when songwriter Lew Spence suggested that they work together. Marilyn, three years younger than Alan, came from the same neighborhood, but they never met when they were kids. They married in 1958, and they stayed together until Marilyn died of respiratory failure in 2022 at the age of 93.

Working with Lew Spence, the Bergmans wrote lyrics for albums from Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. That became their regular working method: They would write lyrics to a composer’s music. Starting with the 1961 film The Right Approach, they usually wrote for movies, TV, and Broadway. They wrote the lyrics for Something More!, their first Broadway musical, in 1964. In 1967, they teamed up with Quincy Jones to write Ray Charles’ title song for the film In The Heat Of The Night. Many years later, they re-teamed with Jones, co-writing “Someone In The Dark,” a song that Michael Jackson recorded for the E.T. audiobook. In 1968, they won their first Oscar for “Windmills Of Your Mind,” written with Michel Legrand for the original Thomas Crown Affair. Noel Harrison sang the original song, but the most famous version is the one that Dusty Springfield included on her classic 1969 album Dusty In Memphis.

Alan and Marilyn Bergman won two more Oscars, for writing Barbra Streisand’s chart-topper “The Way We Were” in 1973 with Marvin Hamlisch and for Streisand’s Yentl title song, co-written with Legrand, in 1983. That year, they co-wrote three of the five Best Original Song nominees. In addition the their wins, the Bergmans were nominated for 13 more Oscars, the last of which was for “Love Is Where You Are,” which Diana Krall sang on the soundtrack of the 1999 Val Kilmer/Mira Sorvino romance At First Sight. The Bergmans also won two Grammys and four Emmys, and they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 1980.

Over the years, the Bergmans had a long working relationship with Barbra Streisand. The worked with Neil Diamond to write Streisand and Diamond’s chart-topping 1978 duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Streisand’s 2011 album What Matters Most was a tribute to the Bergmans. The couple worked with composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, and James Newton Howard.

The Bergmans continued to write together into this century. In 2007, for instance, they worked with Ennio Morricone to write “I Knew I Loved You,” Céline Dion’s song for the tribute album We All Love Ennio Morricone. That same year, Alan Bergman sang a bunch of the songs that he and Marilyn co-wrote on Lyrically, Alan Bergman, his only album as a vocalist. Thanks to a long chain of covers and samples, the Bergmans were credited songwriters on Drake’s 2018 smash “Nice For What.” Below, listen to some of Alan and Marilyn Bergman’s work.