MOVIE MUSIC UK

Lyricist and songwriter Marilyn Bergman died at her home in Los Angeles on January 8, 2022, at the age of 93, from respiratory failure related to COVID-19.

For more than six decades she worked almost inseparably with her husband Alan Bergman, forming one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in Hollywood history. Together they won three Academy Awards, four Emmys and two Grammys, creating enduring film songs including “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “The Way We Were” and the song score for Yentl.

Marilyn Keith was born in Brooklyn on November 10, 1928, remarkably in the same hospital where Alan Bergman had been born three years earlier. She studied music at New York’s High School of Music and Art and later psychology and English at New York University. After moving to Los Angeles she began writing lyrics professionally and met Alan while both were collaborating separately with composer Lew Spence. They married in 1958 and thereafter wrote almost exclusively as a team.

Their early successes included “Yellow Bird” and Frank Sinatra’s “Nice ‘n’ Easy,” but cinema soon became central to their careers. They supplied lyrics to Quincy Jones’s title song for In the Heat of the Night (1967), performed by Ray Charles, before achieving their first Academy Award with Michel Legrand’s “The Windmills of Your Mind” from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). The Bergmans’ intricate, circular lyrics perfectly matched Legrand’s melody and helped make the song one of the most distinctive movie themes of its era.

Their collaboration with Legrand became especially important, producing “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from The Happy Ending, “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42, and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from Best Friends. The relationship culminated in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl (1983), for which the Bergmans wrote lyrics including “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” and “The Way He Makes Me Feel.” The Bergmans and Legrand shared the Academy Award for the film’s original song score.

Streisand became the performer most closely associated with their work. Their defining collaboration was “The Way We Were,” written with Marvin Hamlisch for the 1973 romantic drama starring Streisand and Robert Redford. Its mixture of nostalgia, regret and emotional directness became inseparable from the film, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, and developed into one of Streisand’s signature recordings. The Bergmans later wrote numerous additional songs for her, including the chart-topping Neil Diamond duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

Their range of collaborators was remarkable. They wrote with Henry Mancini, Quincy Jones, Dave Grusin, John Williams, Johnny Mandel and others. At the 1983 Academy Awards the couple achieved the unusual distinction of having three songs nominated simultaneously: “It Might Be You” from Tootsie, “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from Best Friends, and “If We Were in Love” from Yes, Giorgio. Later film songs included “Moonlight,” written with Williams for Sabrina (1995).

Marilyn Bergman was also an important advocate for songwriters. She became the first woman elected to ASCAP’s board of directors and served as the organization’s president and chairman from 1994 to 2009, becoming one of the most influential executives in American music publishing. She and Alan were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980 and later received its Johnny Mercer Award.

Marilyn Bergman is survived by Alan, their daughter Julie and granddaughter Emily. Her partnership with Alan produced songs of unusual intelligence and emotional precision, but Marilyn’s individual importance extended beyond the writing room through her advocacy for composers and lyricists. From the hypnotic imagery of “The Windmills of Your Mind” to the aching remembrance of “The Way We Were” and the emotional sweep of Yentl, her words helped define the sound of romantic cinema for generations.