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The original screen capture, photos Converse Photo Supply for your photographic needs.
By Jon Marcus, Associated Press writer
CAMBRIDGE -- Margret E. Rey, half of the husband-and-wife team that created the "Curious George" children's books, has died.
Ms. Rey, who was 90, died Saturday at her home in Cambridge, where neighbors said she had been bedridden for several weeks. The cause of her death was not immediately disclosed.
She and her husband, the late H.A. Rey, created the irrepressible fictional monkey Curious George while living in Paris in the 1930s, and escaped on bicycles with the unsold manuscript in 1940 just before German troops occupied the city.
"Actually, it was fun," Margret Rey (see photo) said of their journey in an interview with The Associated Press in April. "People always ask, 'Were you afraid?' You don't have time to be afraid."
She was born in Hamburg, Germany, on May 16, 1906. She met Hans Augusto Rey as a girl and they married years later in Brazil, where he went in 1923 to escape Germany's post-World War I inflation.
Ms. Rey studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, the Academy of Art in Duesseldorf and an art school in Berlin. She had a one-woman show of her watercolors in Berlin in the early 1920s. She also was a newspaper reporter, a copywriter in an advertising agency and a photographer.
After their honeymoon, the Reys moved to Paris, where a publisher who had seen H.A. Rey's humorous drawing of a giraffe asked them to collaborate on a children's book. The result was the 1939 book "Rafi et les Neuf Singes.' One of the "Nine Monkeys" of the title was a prototype for George.
After fleeing the invading Germans, the couple made their way to Lisbon and eventually to New York by way of Rio de Janeiro.
Almost as soon as they arrived, the Reys sold "Curious George" to the Houghton Mifflin Co., which published it in 1941. The Reys wrote six more Curious George books over the next 25 years, all about the trouble-prone monkey who wreaks havoc and has to be rescued or forgiven -- or saves the day.
"He became very much a figure of his own," Margret Rey said. "He knew what he could do and couldn't do. He became a person."
Though both were artists, H.A. Rey illustrated the Curious George books while Margret Rey created the stories. They had no children of their own.
The series has sold more than 20 million copies in 12 languages. An anthology released last year, "The Complete Adventures of Curious George," is in its second printing.
The Reys moved to Cambridge in 1963, and H.A. Rey died in 1977.
In addition to the seven original Curious George books, Margret Rey created 28 other Curious George adventures with Alan J. Shalleck. She also published five other books, including "Spotty" and "Pretzel," which will be re-released in 1997; and oversaw a Curious George merchandising program that has issued more than 50 licenses for products.
"For someone who never had kids, she had a tremendous rapport with them and an uncanny knowledge of what would appeal to them," said Hillel Stavis, who with his wife this year opened a shop called Curious George Goes to Wordsworth near their Wordsworth bookstore in Harvard Square.
But adults liked the little monkey,, too.
"Curious George was a perfect bridge between the two worlds, especially because he was curious, and curious in a kind of non-threatening way," said Mr. Stavis, who was a neighbor and friend of Margret Rey for 25 years. "Especially with the lack of quality in kids' literature that is everywhere these days, and television as a main deterrent, it was a particularly great line of books."
When she turned 90 this year, Ms. Rey gave $1 million each to the Boston Public Library to improve children's rooms in its branches; and Beth Israel Hospital for its Center for Alternative Medicine for Research, which studies nontraditional therapies.
"Margret lived to the fullest every minute of her long and productive life and enriched the lives of millions through the Curious George books," said Nader Darehshori, chairman and chief executive of Houghton Mifflin.
Funeral arrangements had not yet been made Sunday.
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