Married from 1958 until Marilyn's death, together they wrote music and lyrics for numerous celebrated television, film, and stage productions.

The Bergmans enjoyed a successful career, honored with four Emmys, three Oscars, and two Grammys (including Song of the Year).

[3] He studied at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned his master's degree in music at UCLA.

[11][12] In 1961, the Bergmans wrote their first title song for a motion picture, for The Right Approach, composed by Spence.

[13] The Bergmans wrote lyrics for "In the Heat of the Night" with music by Quincy Jones for the 1967 film of the same name, which has been described as their "breakthrough".

The Bergmans and Legrand were subsequently nominated for the Best Original Song award in the following two years for "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?"

The couple's minor work with Legrand in this period included the contrafactum (rather than a translation) "You Must Believe in Spring" of Maxence's song from the film The Young Girls of Rochefort, "Listen to the Sea" from Ice Station Zebra (1968), and "Nobody Knows" and "Sweet Gingerbread Man" from The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970).

[19][20] According to the National Endowment for the Arts and Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in their list of the top 365 "Songs of the Century", the single was placed at number 298.

The Bergmans were also co-writers of "An American Reunion", the opening ceremony of the inaugural festivities at Washington D.C.'s Lincoln Memorial that marked Bill Clinton's first term as President of the United States in January 1993.

The Kennedy Center commissioned the Bergmans to write a song cycle in 2001, they chose to collaborate with the composer Cy Coleman.

[8] The Bergmans wrote the lyrics to Billy Goldenberg's television musical Queen of the Stardust Ballroom which won the couple their third Primetime Emmy Award Outstanding Achievement in Special Musical Material, it was later the couple's second Broadway show, Ballroom, which opened in 1978.

[23] Reviewing the album for Allmusic, John Bush praised Bergman's "excellent interpretive skills" and Christopher Loundon in the JazzTimes described Bergman's voice as a "...revelation, suggesting both the wise, elder Sinatra and the astutely mellow Fred Astaire, with a touch of the offbeat dreaminess of Chet Baker.

The Bergmans received their fifth Emmy nomination for the song "On the Way to Becoming Me" (music by Marvin Hamlisch) from the AFI tribute to Streisand.

[30] In 1998, Marilyn received an Honorary doctorate from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and in 2011, Alan was presented with a Distinguished Alumnus award from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina.

Marilyn served as the president and chairman of the board of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for fifteen years, from 1994 to 2009.