R.I.P.: Marilyn Bergman, Oscar-Winning Lyricist

Marilyn & Alan Bergman

Marilyn Bergman, an Oscar-winning lyricist who collaborated with her husband, Alan Bergman, on some of the most enduring pop songs heard at the movies, among them “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind,” died Jan. 8 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 93, reports The Washington Post.

The cause was respiratory failure, said her daughter, Julie Bergman.

The Bergmans wed in 1958 and spent a lifetime marrying memorable words to melodies by Michel Legrand, Marvin Hamlisch, Quincy Jones, John Williams and Dave Grusin. Their songs, many of them full of romance and regret, were interpreted by entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Neil Diamond and — most frequently — Barbra Streisand.

“Their spectacular marriage gives their lyrics an authenticity,” Streisand wrote in the liner notes of her 2011 album “What Matters Most,” filled with Bergman-penned songs, “making them both deeply personal and, at the same time, completely universal.”

“Memories light the corners of my mind / misty watercolor memories / of the way we were,” Streisand sang to Hamlisch’s bittersweet melody during the opening titles for the 1973 film “The Way We Were,” which starred the singer as a political Jewish firebrand in love with Robert Redford’s complacent WASP writer.

The couple had early hits on the radio — the 1959 calypso song “Yellow Bird,” performed by the Mills Brothers and the 1960 Frank Sinatra song “Nice ’n’ Easy,” — but they set their sights on cinema from the start.

Filmmaker Norman Jewison paired the Bergmans with Jones to write music for his 1967 drama “In the Heat of the Night,” about a Philadelphia detective (Sidney Poitier) who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in the Deep South. The gospel blues title song — with soulful lines such as “I could sell my soul for just a little light” — gave Charles a Top 40 hit.

Jewison hired the couple to work with Legrand on “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), starring Steve McQueen as a criminal mastermind and Faye Dunaway as a sexy insurance investigator in pursuit. For a scene in which McQueen sails in a glider for several minutes, the songwriters came up with “The Windmills of Your Mind.”

“It was heaven,” Ms. Bergman told the Film Music Foundation in 2011, “because we were used to being interrupted by dialogue or sound effects, and nothing ever ran very long.”

The song brought the Bergmans their first Oscar — and gave Dusty Springfield a Top 40 hit — in 1969.

Their other Oscars came for two Streisand projects: “The Way We Were,” and the songs for “Yentl,” written with Legrand and including “Papa Can You Hear Me?”

The Bergmans met the young singer after a show at the Bon Soir nightclub in New York’s Greenwhich Village in the early 1960s, and her voice reduced Ms. Bergman to tears. They began a lifelong partnership that had the same effect on millions of listeners.