Three-time Academy Award-winning songwriter and Brooklyn native Alan Bergman has died less than two months before his 100th birthday.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, film producer Julie Bergman Sender, who told The Hollywood Reporter that her father died from natural causes at his Los Angeles home Thursday night.
Bergman was preceded in death by his wife and songwriting partner, Marilyn Bergman, who died of respiratory failure in 2022.
Together, the couple was responsible for penning several hits made famous by fellow Brooklynite Barbra Streisand, including “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and Oscar-winner “The Way We Were.” The pair, nominated for a total of 16 Academy Awards, also took home the win for scoring Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl.”
The Bergmans’ trophy cabinet also includes the statue from when they were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980, as well as three Emmy Awards. TV watchers who know the theme songs to “Good Times,” “Alice,” “Maude” and “Brooklyn Bridge” are familiar with the Bergmans’ work.
Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Sergio Mendes have also sung lyrics penned by the pair.
Prior to his death, Alan Bergman enjoyed success one last time in March when his song “The Windmills of Your Mind” was featured in the series finale of the Apple TV+ series “Severance.” He and his wife won the Academy Award after that song was sung by Noel Harrison at the start of 1968’s “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
Bergman said in a 2024 interview with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) that he started writing songs when he was 13 years old growing up in Crown Heights.
“When you’re born in Brooklyn and you’re Jewish, when you were 6 years old, you took piano lessons,” he recalled.
After attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bergman eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he earned a masters degree in music from UCLA. In was only in L.A. that he met his future wife, despite them having both been born at the same Brooklyn hospital.
Two years after they first started collaborating on music, the Bergmans married in 1958 and remained together — personally and professionally — until Marilyn’s death.
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