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Alan Bergman, 1925-2025
Lyricist and songwriter Alan Bergman died at his home in Los Angeles on July 17, 2025, at the age of 99, after suffering from respiratory problems.
For more than six decades he worked almost inseparably with his wife Marilyn Bergman, creating some of the most enduring songs written for American cinema. Together the Bergmans received 16 Academy Award nominations and won three Oscars, for “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “The Way We Were,” and the song score of Yentl.
Bergman was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 11, 1925. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1948 and later studied music at UCLA before establishing himself as a songwriter in Los Angeles. He met Marilyn Keith through their mutual collaborator Lew Spence in 1957; they married the following year and developed one of the longest and most successful songwriting partnerships in American popular music.
Their early successes included “Yellow Bird” and “Nice ‘n’ Easy,” the latter recorded by Frank Sinatra, but cinema soon became central to their careers. One of their first major film assignments was Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), for which they supplied lyrics to Quincy Jones’s title song, memorably performed by Ray Charles. Their gift for expressing complicated emotions with apparently simple language proved ideally suited to film. Read more…
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