Marilyn Bergman, who together with her husband, Alan Bergman, gave the world memorable lyrics about “misty watercolor recollections” and “the windmills of your thoughts” and gained three Academy Awards, died on Saturday at her residence in Los Angeles. She was 93.
A spokesman, Ken Sunshine, mentioned the trigger was respiratory failure.
The Bergmans’ lyrics, set to melodies by composers like Marvin Hamlisch and Michel Legrand, weren’t in every single place, nevertheless it typically appeared that manner. For a few years their phrases have been additionally heard each week over the opening credit to hit tv reveals like “Maude,” “Good Instances” and “Alice.”
The Bergmans and Mr. Hamlisch gained the 1974 best-song Academy Award for “The Manner We Have been,” from the Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand romance of the identical identify. (The album of that film’s rating additionally gained the Bergmans their solely Grammy Award.) Their different best-song winner, “The Windmills of Your Thoughts” (“Spherical, like a circle in a spiral/Like a wheel inside a wheel”), was written with Mr. Legrand for the 1968 movie “The Thomas Crown Affair.” Their third Oscar was for the rating of Ms. Streisand’s 1983 movie “Yentl,” additionally written with Mr. Legrand.
Except for the Oscar winners, their different widespread songs included the title observe of Frank Sinatra’s album “Good ’n’ Straightforward,” written with the songwriter Lew Spence; the poignant ballad “What Are You Doing the Remainder of Your Life,” from the 1969 film “The Completely happy Ending,” with music by Mr. Legrand; and “The place Do You Begin?,” written with Johnny Mandel and lined by artists like Tony Bennett, Michael Feinstein and Ms. Streisand.
Ms. Streisand launched an album of the Bergmans’ songs, “What Issues Most,” in 2011. The compilation “Sinatra Sings Alan & Marilyn Bergman” was launched in 2019.
Tv was a major a part of the Bergmans’ careers as properly. They gained three Emmy Awards: for the rating of the 1976 TV film “Sybil,” written with Leonard Rosenman; the track “Abnormal Miracles,” written with Mr. Hamlisch and carried out by Ms. Streisand in a 1995 live performance particular; and “A Ticket to Dream,” one other Hamlisch collaboration, written for the American Movie Institute’s 1998 particular “100 Years … 100 Motion pictures.”
However their lyrics have been in all probability heard way more usually by viewers of widespread late-Twentieth-century tv collection. They wrote the phrases to the bouncy theme songs for the hit sitcoms “Maude,” “Alice” and “Good Instances,” in addition to the themes for the nostalgic comedy collection “Brooklyn Bridge” and the drama collection “Within the Warmth of the Evening.” Their hit “You Don’t Carry Me Flowers,” finest referred to as a duet by Neil Diamond (who wrote the music) and Ms. Streisand, was initially written for Norman Lear’s short-lived collection “All That Glitters.”
Early in her profession, Ms. Bergman was one in every of comparatively few ladies within the songwriting enterprise. In a 2007 interview with NPR, she recalled attending conferences of the efficiency rights group ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) at which the one ladies “can be me and loads of the widows of songwriters who have been representing their husbands’ estates.” She was the primary lady to function president of ASCAP, a place she held from 1994 to 2009.
Marilyn Katz was born on Nov. 10, 1928, in the identical Brooklyn hospital the place Alan Bergman had been born 4 years earlier. The daughter of Edith (Arkin) and Albert Katz, she attended the Excessive College of Music and Artwork in Manhattan, now LaGuardia Excessive College of Music & Artwork and Performing Arts.
A faculty pal launched her to an uncle, Bob Russell, who wrote the lyrics to the Duke Ellington hit “Don’t Get Round A lot Anymore” and would later write the lyrics to “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Marilyn commonly went to his residence after faculty to play piano for him as he wrote.
By the point she had earned a bachelor’s diploma in psychology and English from New York College, she had put aside concepts of a music profession and deliberate to grow to be a psychologist. However a fateful accident despatched her again to the humanities.
In 1956 she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her shoulder. Looking for assist throughout her recuperation, she flew to Los Angeles to stick with her mother and father, who had moved there. So had Mr. Russell, and when she seemed him up he advised that she do some songwriting herself. Unable to play the piano due to her damage, she recalled a few years later, she couldn’t compose and so determined to jot down lyrics as an alternative.
Working underneath the identify Marilyn Keith, she took a job with Mr. Spence, who additionally labored with Alan Bergman. Mr. Spence launched the 2, and their musical partnership started instantly. They have been married two years later.
Requested in 2010 on the tv program “CBS Information Sunday Morning” how she and Mr. Bergman managed to work collectively whereas staying married, she mentioned: “The way in which porcupines make love. Rigorously.”
Ms. Bergman’s husband survives her, as do their daughter, Julie Bergman, and a granddaughter.
In a 2002 interview with American Songwriter journal, Ms. Bergman outlined the distinction between an newbie {and professional} songwriter as “the power to rewrite” and “to not have fallen so in love with what you’ve written which you could’t discover a higher manner.”
The Bergmans have been inducted within the Songwriters Corridor of Fame in 1980 and collectively obtained a Trustees Award from the Nationwide Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2013.
Though finest identified for his or her film and tv work, the Bergmans did attempt writing for the Broadway stage, though they didn’t have a lot success. “One thing Extra!,” starring Barbara Prepare dinner and Arthur Hill, for which they wrote the lyrics and Sammy Fain wrote the music, lasted lower than two weeks in 1964. They fared higher, however not by a lot, in 1978 with “Ballroom,” an adaptation of the 1975 TV film “Queen of the Stardust Ballroom” with music by Billy Goldenberg. Regardless of being produced and directed by Michael Bennett, whose earlier Broadway present had been the monster hit “A Refrain Line,” “Ballroom” closed after three months.
“Our experiences within the theater and movie,” Ms. Bergman instructed The New York Instances in 1982, “have proven us that the 2 require totally completely different sorts of writing.” And films have been at all times the couple’s past love.
“We discovered we have to be extra summary when writing for movie,” she mentioned, “as a result of movie actually speaks extra to the preconscious a part of the mind, the a part of us that desires.”