Jon Burlingame “Misty watercolor memories of the way we were…”“Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind…”“I could sell my soul for just a little light in the heat of the night…”Those lyrics, just three of the hundreds written by Marilyn Bergman, along with her husband, Alan, resonate with millions of moviegoers and record-buyers.

Marilyn, who died on Jan. 8, was a three-time Oscar winner, four-time Emmy winner and two-time Grammy winner for her accomplishments across six decades.The Bergmans were poets, although she denied it (“they’re tot-ally different disciplines,” she said in 2015), who found their calling in lyric writing, mostly for movies.

For “The Happy Ending,” director Richard Brooks asked them for a song that would work for both the beginning of a love affair and the bitter, toxic end of a marriage.They wrote “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” to a memorable Michel Legrand melody: “…all the seasons and the times of your days, all the nickels and the dimes of your days, let the reasons and the rhymes of your days all begin and end with me.” Poetry, surely.They applied their writing mostly to movies, and the pictures they painted with words were often inspired by the stories and images of the film themselves.The glider sequence in “The Thomas Crown Affair” was the starting point for “The Windmills of Your Mind,” with all its circular imagery (“like a door that keeps revolving in a half-forgotten dream, or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream”).The bittersweet tone of “The Way We Were” (“scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind, smiles we gave to one another…”) emerged from filmmaker Sydney Pollack’s flashbacks of Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in their.

Marilyn Bergman’s Lyrical Legacy Memorialized in Classic Hollywood Songs

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