As long as popular songs are sung, Alan Bergman’s name will be in lights. With his wife and writing partner Marilyn, Bergman, who has died aged 99, created a catalogue of indelible showstoppers from a string of some of Hollywood’s best-loved films, on which they collaborated with a string of prestigious composers.
They enjoyed great success with Michel Legrand, with whom they won the first of their three Academy awards for The Windmills of Your Mind (sung by Noel Harrison in The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), and their third for their work on the Barbra Streisand vehicle Yentl (1983). Streisand scored a US Top 40 hit with The Way He Makes Me Feel from the Yentl soundtrack. It was also with Legrand that they composed one of their most haunting pieces, What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? from the film The Happy Ending (1969). It earned them an Academy award nomination and would be recorded by numerous artists.
They won their second Oscar in partnership with Marvin Hamlisch, their musical partner on The Way We Were from the eponymous Streisand/Robert Redford film (1973). Streisand’s recording of the theme song topped the US chart and sold two million copies. Other memorable collaborations came with Quincy Jones (In the Heat of the Night), Henry Mancini (All His Children, from Sometimes A Great Notion) and Dave Grusin (It Might Be You, from Tootsie).
The best singers inevitably gravitated to the best writers, and the Bergmans’ material was performed by the most celebrated vocalists of the 20th century, including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Celine Dion, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Sarah Vaughan and Neil Diamond. In 1978, Diamond and Streisand’s duet recording of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers (written by Diamond and the Bergmans for the TV sitcom All That Glitters) topped the US Billboard chart. This was after Diamond and Streisand had each recorded a solo version of the song, which several radio stations spliced together to create an unofficial duet. This prompted the singers to go into the studio to record an “authorised” duet. In 2011, Streisand released the album What Matters Most, a collection of songs with lyrics by the Bergmans.
Streisand later said that Bergman “was family to me – a father figure”.
In the film Yes, Giorgio (1982), Luciano Pavarotti sang If We Were in Love, composed by the Bergmans with John Williams. The song earned one of three Oscar nominations for the Bergmans in 1983, alongside If We Were in Love and How Do You Keep the Music Playing? (from Best Friends). Nevertheless, they were beaten to the award that year by Up Where We Belong, from An Officer and a Gentleman. Between 1970 and 1996, the couple received 16 Oscar nominations.
In addition, they won three Emmy awards. One was for the 1976 TV movie Sybil, and the other two were in collaboration with Hamlisch, including the song Ordinary Miracles for a Streisand TV special in 1995. The Way We Were also brought them a pair of Grammy awards, and in 2013 the Bergmans were given a Grammy Trustees award.
Born in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, Alan was the elder of two sons of Samuel and Ruth (nee Margulies) Bergman. His father was a clothing salesman. Alan had begun studying piano aged six, and also began writing song lyrics as a young boy. After attending the Ethical Culture Fieldston school and Abraham Lincoln high school in Brooklyn, he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
His education was interrupted by the second world war, and he was drafted into the US Army in 1943. He was wounded while serving as an infantryman, and reassigned to Camp Butner, North Carolina. There, he gained some valuable experience by creating shows for the army’s Special Services entertainment branch.
After completing his studies at Chapel Hill in 1948, he moved to California to take a master’s degree in music at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He met the singer and composer Johnny Mercer. As Bergman recalled: “When I was a graduate student at UCLA, [Mercer] took a liking to me, and between the years 1952-55 he was like my mentor ... I would not be here today without him. He was a great influence.”
Bergman worked for a time as a television director for the WCAU station in Philadelphia while collaborating with Lew Spence, a songwriter, in Los Angeles. The Spence-Bergman composition That Face proved to be a turning point in his life. Marilyn Keith was also working with Spence as a lyricist, and Bergman wrote his lyric for That Face with her in mind. Keith’s favourite actor was Fred Astaire, and after Astaire recorded That Face, Bergman presented Marilyn with a copy of it. He simultaneously delivered a marriage proposal, which she accepted. “Instead of a ring, he gave me Fred Astaire,” she later commented.
By the time they married in 1958 they were already writing together (“premarital rhyming was going on,” Alan later wisecracked), and among their early hits were the calypso-style Yellow Bird for the Norman Luboff Choir (1957) and the title song for Sinatra’s album Nice ’n’ Easy (1960). He described their collaborative writing process as “like pitching and catching, back and forth. And when we write four bars or eight bars, I sing them, so singing is a part of the process. It’s constant, back-and-forth communication.”
In 2007 Alan released the solo album Lyrically, Alan Bergman, featuring 13 songs with lyrics by the Bergmans. A reviewer for Jazz Times detected hints of Sinatra, Astaire and Chet Baker in Bergman’s singing. Additional projects by the Bergmans included the stage musicals Something More! (1964) and Ballroom (1978), and theme songs for TV series The Sandy Duncan Show, Maude, Good Times and Alice. The couple were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980 and received its Johnny Mercer award in 1997. In 1995 they were given a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Songwriters.
Marilyn died in 2022. Alan is survived by their daughter, Julie, and granddaughter, Emily.
• Alan Bergman, songwriter, born 11 September 1925; died 17 July 2025
