Alan Bergman, Oscar-winning songwriter for Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, dies at 99

USA Today

5 days ago

Alan Bergman wrote a song with his future wife on the day they first met. Over the next 60 years, they never stopped making music together.
Bergman was one half of one of the greatest American songwriting duos. The other half was his wife Marilyn, who died in 2022. On July 17, Alan Bergman died at 99, family spokesperson Ken Sunshine told Reuters.
Together, the Bergmans wrote the lyrics for "The Way We Were" and "The Windmills of Your Mind," tunes for the film "Yentl," and the theme songs for 1970s television comedies "Maude," "Alice" and "Good Times."
"It was a terrible song, but we loved the process," Bergman said in 2011 of that first collaboration. "And from that day on, we've been writing together."
The songwriting team went on to win three Oscars, four Emmys and two Grammy awards, and to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980.
Their lyrics were set to the music of composers including Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, John Williams and Quincy Jones. Singers ranging from Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra to Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand and Sting recorded their songs.
Johnny Mercer of 'Moon River' fame mentored Bergman
Alan Bergman was born in September 1925 in Brooklyn, New York, in the same hospital where his wife was born a few years later. But the couple didn't meet until 1956, when they were introduced by the composer Lew Spence in Los Angeles. The couple married in 1958 and had one daughter.
Bergman wrote his first song when he was 13 years old and continued to pen lyrics into his 90s, after his wife's death. The song "Wherever I May Go (for Marilyn)" was a tribute to her.
Bergman studied at the University of North Carolina and completed a Master's degree in music at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he met songwriter Johnny Mercer. Mercer, who wrote the lyrics of "Moon River" for the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" in 1961, became his mentor.
Despite his desire to write songs, Bergman first worked as a TV producer in Philadelphia. At Mercer's urging, he moved to California in the 1950s.
"I was writing both music and lyrics in those days, and he would listen to what I was writing and critique it and encourage me," Bergman told JazzTimes magazine in 2024. "I would not be here today without him. He was a great influence."
Bergman liked to use a baseball analogy to explain the couple's writing process — pitching and catching ideas back and forth. He preferred to have the music before he began to write the lyrics. Composers would leave their compositions with the couple. They would then write words that fit the notes.
"We believe that words are at the tips of those notes and it's our job to find them," he told NPR in 2011. "That's the adventure."
Alan Bergman, wife Marilyn Bergman's big break came on Frank Sinatra's 'Nice 'n' Easy'
"Yellow Bird" was the duo's first money-making song, but their big break came with Frank Sinatra's 1960 album "Nice 'n' Easy." The crooner became a friend of the couple. He referred to them as "the kids." They had another career breakthrough when they worked with composer and producer Quincy Jones in 1967 on the song "In the Heat of the Night," for the film of the same name.
They won their first Academy Award for best original song for writing "The Windmills of Your Mind" the following year, with Michel Legrand, for the film "The Thomas Crown Affair." They were awarded another Oscar in 1974 for "The Way We Were" with Marvin Hamlisch, as well as a Grammy for Song of the Year in 1975.
In 1983, the couple were the first songwriters to have written three of the five Oscar-nominated songs. Two years later they took home their third Academy Award for "Yentl," starring Barbra Streisand. The singer became a friend and frequent interpreter of their music, recording more than 50 of their songs. She released the album "What Matters Most" as a tribute to the Bergmans and their music.
The couple's Emmys included awards for the TV movies "Queen of the Stardust Ballroom" (1975) and "Sybil" (1977), and the song "Ordinary Miracles" from the 1995 Streisand special "Barbra: The Concert."