Multi-award winning composer Alan Bergman, who with his wife Marilyn penned such songs as “The Way We Were,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life,” and the themes to the film “In the Heat of the Night,” and TV’s “Alice,” has died at his Los Angeles home. He was 99.
Family spokesman Ken Sunshine said in a statement Bergman died Thursday and had, in recent months, suffered from respiratory issues “but continued to write songs till the very end.”
Deadline characterized Alan and Marilyn Bergman as “two of the most influential lyricists of 20th century American music.”
Their collaborations with the likes of Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, Quincy Jones and John Williams earned four Emmy Awards, three Oscars and two Grammys. There were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980.
Other noted songs by the Bergmans include the Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond hit “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” “Nice ”n” Easy for Frank Sinatra’s 1960 album of the same name plus “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” and “The Way He Makes Me Feel,” from the 1983 film “Yentl, directed by Streisand.
Their TV themes included sitcoms created by the late Norman Lear: “And Then There’s Maude” from “Maude” starring Bea Arthur and “Good Times” for the show of the same name.
Bergman was born in Brooklyn in 1925, He moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s and earned a master’s degree in music from UCLA.
In 1958, he married his wife Marilyn and the two continued working together until her death in 2022.
He is survived by his daughter, independent producer Julie Bergman, and a granddaughter, Emily Sender.