As long as popular songs are sung, Alan Bergman’s name will be in lights. With his wife and writing partner Marilyn, Bergman, who has died aged 99, created a catalogue of indelible showstoppers from a string of some of Hollywood’s best-loved films, on which they collaborated with a string of prestigious composers.
They enjoyed great success with Michel Legrand, with whom they won the first of their three Academy awards for The Windmills of Your Mind (sung by Noel Harrison in The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), and their third for their work on the Barbra Streisand vehicle Yentl (1983). Streisand scored a US Top 40 hit with The Way He Makes Me Feel from the Yentl soundtrack. It was also with Legrand that they composed one of their most haunting pieces, What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? from the film The Happy Ending (1969). It earned them an Academy award nomination and would be recorded by numerous artists.
