Alan Bergman, the Academy Award-winning songwriter of “The Way We Were,” passes away at 99

Variety reports that Hollywood legacy artist, Alan Bergman, has passed away at the age of 99 years old. Bergman had a songwriting partnership with his wife, Marilyn Bergman, that lasted over six decades. Marilyn had passed back in January of 2022. She was the first woman president and chairman of the board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), which was a leading performing-rights society for music-makers. After her death, Alan would continue to write music.

Bergman is a near EGOT winner as he garnered Oscar, Emmy and Grammy wins for his work that includes “The Way We Were,” “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “In the Heat of the Night.” Alan and Marilyn have hundreds of songs in their resume for movies and television. Their style would combine the sensibilities of traditional Great American Songbook era artists — Rodgers & Hart, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin — and marry it with the more modern pop sound of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

The Bergmans collaborated with a great deal of acclaimed directors and were usually called forth by names like Syndey Pollack, Norman Jewison and Richard Brooks. The Bergmans has won Oscars for their work on Windmills in 1968, with French composer Legrand, from The Thomas Crown Affair, for the title song of The Way We Were in 1973, with Hamlisch, and the musical score for Barbra Streisand’s Yentl in 1983, which teamed them again with Legrand.

The duo was also nominated thirteen more times for Academy Awards. Five of those times was with their close friend Legrand, which included “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from the 1969 film The Happy Ending, the title song from 1970’s Pieces of Dreams, “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from 1982’s Best Friends, and two songs from Yentl, “Papa Can You Hear Me?”(which was given a little nod in Deadpool 2) and “The Way He Makes Me Feel.”

Bergman stated in an interview for the Film Music Foundation,

We had a passion, and a joy, for writing. We loved to write. We write every day. When you love what you do, and you do it with someone you love, that helps everything.”

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