Alan Bergman, Half of a Prolific Lyric-Writing Team, Dies at 99

New York Times

18-07-2025

Alan Bergman, who teamed with his wife, Marilyn, to write lyrics for the Academy Award-winning songs 'The Way We Were' and 'The Windmills of Your Mind' and for some of television's most memorable theme songs, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.
His death was announced by a family spokesman, Ken Sunshine.
The Bergmans regularly collaborated with prominent composers like Marvin Hamlisch, with whom they wrote 'The Way We Were,' from the 1973 Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford romance of the same name, and Michel Legrand, with whom they wrote 'The Windmills of Your Mind,' from the 1968 crime movie 'The Thomas Crown Affair,' starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. They also wrote the lyrics to Mr. Legrand's score for Ms. Streisand's 1983 film 'Yentl,' for which they won their third Academy Award.
The Bergmans were among the favored lyricists of stars like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and especially Ms. Streisand, who in 2011 released the album 'What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.' The album's 10 tracks included 'The Windmills of Your Mind,' 'Nice 'n' Easy,' 'That Face' and the title song, none of which were among the numerous Bergman lyrics Ms. Streisand had recorded before. Promoting the album, she described the Bergmans as having 'a remarkable gift for expressing affairs of the heart.'
Between 1970 and 1996, the Bergmans received a total of 16 Oscar nominations. One year, 1983, they claimed three of the five best-song nominations, for 'It Might Be You' from 'Tootsie,' 'If We Were in Love' from 'Yes, Giorgio' and 'How Do You Keep the Music Playing?' from 'Best Friends.' (They lost to 'Up Where We Belong' from 'An Officer and a Gentleman.')
They also received three Emmy Awards: for the score of the 1976 TV movie 'Sybil,' for which they wrote the lyrics to Leonard Rosenman's title song; 'Ordinary Miracles,' a song they wrote with Mr. Hamlisch for a 1995 Streisand concert special; and 'A Ticket to Dream,' another collaboration with Mr. Hamlisch, for a 1998 American Film Institute special.
But television audiences heard their work most often in the series theme songs for which they wrote the lyrics. These included the gospel-inflected themes for the comedy series 'Maude' and 'Good Times', both with music by Dave Grusin, and the breezily upbeat 'There's a New Girl in Town,' the theme from the sitcom 'Alice,' with music by David Shire.
The Bergmans won their only competitive Grammy Award for the soundtrack album for 'The Way They Were,' which they shared with Mr. Hamlisch. In 2013, they received a Grammy Trustees Award.
They also collaborated on two Broadway shows, 'Something More!' (with music by Sammy Fain) in 1964 and 'Ballroom (with music by Billy Goldenberg) in 1978, although neither was a hit.
Like many creative teams, the Bergmans had their priorities. 'We prefer to have the melody' before working on the lyrics, Mr. Bergman said in a 2007 NPR interview. 'We feel that when we have the melody, there are words on the tips of those notes, and we have to find them.'
Alan Bergman was born on Sept. 11, 1925, in the same Brooklyn hospital where his wife would be born three years later. He was the elder of two sons of Samuel and Ruth (Margulies) Bergman. His father was a clothing salesman.
He began piano lessons when he was 6 and began writing songs as a boy. He attended the Ethical Culture School and Abraham Lincoln High School, graduating early to enter the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 16. He studied music and theater arts there, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted by the Army in 1943.
He served in the infantry during World War II and, after he was wounded, was reassigned to Camp Butner in North Carolina, where he wrote and directed Special Services shows.
He completed college at Chapel Hill under the G.I. Bill in 1948. The next year he earned a master's degree in music from the University of California, Los Angeles. It was there that he met the songwriter Johnny Mercer, who became a friend and a mentor.
Mr. Bergman moonlighted as a television director in Philadelphia and worked as a lyricist with the songwriter Lew Spence in Los Angeles while waiting for his break in the songwriting business. That came with 'That Face,' which he wrote with Mr. Spence.
The title and the first line were inspired by the actress Phyllis Kirk, whom Mr. Spence was dating. But Mr. Bergman wrote the rest of the words with Marilyn Keith in mind; she was also working with Mr. Spence as a lyricist. After Fred Astaire agreed to record the song, Mr. Bergman presented the recording to Ms. Keith along with a wedding proposal. She said yes.
'Instead of a ring,' Ms. Bergman recalled many years later, 'he gave me Fred Astaire.'
Marilyn Bergman died in 2022. Mr. Bergman is survived by their daughter, Julie Bergman, and a granddaughter.
By the time the couple married in 1958, they had already begun writing together. ('Premarital rhyming was going on,' Mr. Bergman said with a smile in a 2010 interview on 'CBS News Sunday Morning.')
One of their first hits was the Caribbean-flavored 'Yellow Bird' ('Yellow bird, up high in banana tree/Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me'), for which they wrote new lyrics to a 19th-century Haitian song, 'Choucoune,' when the choir director Norman Luboff was looking for material for a calypso album in 1957. The song was later recorded by the Mills Brothers, the Brothers Four and many others.
Mr. Bergman was often asked about the creative experience involved in working so closely with his wife. In that same 2010 interview, he said: 'One is the creator and the other is the editor. And those roles change within seconds.'
He put it another way in an interview with The New York Times in 1982: 'The actual process of writing the lyric is like two potters passing clay back and forth. At the end of the song, we rarely know who wrote what.'