Alan Bergman, legendary Oscar-winning lyricist behind “The Way We Were” and “Windmills of Your Mind,” dies at 99, leaving a legacy of timeless songs.
Alan Bergman, the Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning lyricist whose songs helped define film and television music from the 1960s through the 1980s, died Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.
According to AP News, Bergman’s passing, just six months after the death of his wife and longtime writing partner Marilyn Bergman, marks the close of a songwriting partnership that spanned more than six decades and produced some of the most enduring melodies of the modern American soundtrack. Together, they penned hundreds of songs, many of which became integral to the films and TV shows they accompanied.
Born on September 11, 1925, in Brooklyn, New York, Alan Bergman studied music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before earning a master’s degree at UCLA.
Early in his career, he was mentored by Johnny Mercer, the celebrated lyricist behind standards such as “Accentuate the Positive.” In California in the late 1950s, he met Marilyn Keith, then an emerging songwriter; they married in February 1958 and immediately began collaborating.
Their creative process was famously conversational: one partner would sketch out lyrics, then the other would refine, “pitching and catching” lines back and forth until each song was perfected. “When you love what you do, and you do it with someone you love, that helps everything,” Alan told the Film Music Foundation in 2011.
The Bergmans first broke through in 1967 with “In the Heat of the Night,” a collaboration with Quincy Jones for the Sidney Poitier–starrer of the same name. They won their first Academy Award the following year for “The Windmills of Your Mind,” set to Michel Legrand’s haunting melody in The Thomas Crown Affair.
It was the first of three Oscars they would collect. Their second came in 1973 for the title song of The Way We Were, composed by Marvin Hamlisch and immortalized by Barbra Streisand. Their third Oscar, for song score, arrived in 1983 for Streisand’s Yentl, again with Legrand.
Over their careers, the Bergmans earned a total of 16 Academy Award nominations, working with an array of top composers—John Williams, Henry Mancini, Dave Grusin, John Barry and James Newton Howard among them. They also garnered multiple Grammy nods, winning Song of the Year for “The Way We Were,” and crafted memorable television themes, including those for Maude, Good Times and Alice.
Beyond awards, the Bergmans’ lyrics entered the Great American Songbook through recordings by Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett and many others. Their song “Windmills” remains a modern classic—“round, like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel”—while the opening lines of “The Way We Were” (“Memories light the corners of my mind…”) continue to evoke nostalgia across generations.
Marilyn Bergman, who served as the first female president and chairman of ASCAP, died in January 2022. Alan Bergman is survived by their daughter, Julie, and a granddaughter. Services will be private; near the close of his life, Alan said simply: “We write every day. We loved to write.” His lyrics will doubtless continue to spin in the memories of film and music lovers everywhere.
