MARGRET REY, 90, CO-CREATOR OF `CURIOUS GEORGE' BOOKS.

Byline: Nick Ravo The New York Times

Margret Rey, who teamed with her husband to create the ``Curious George'' children's books featuring the inquisitive little monkey, died Saturday at her home in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.

Rey died from complications following a heart attack she suffered about three weeks ago, according to a statement released by her publisher Houghton Mifflin, in Boston.

She and her husband, H.A. Rey, created the character in the 1930s while living in Paris, where they had settled after their honeymoon. Just before the German invasion in 1940, the couple fled to the United States with the unsold manuscript. Houghton Mifflin published ``Curious George'' the following year and six sequels over the next 25 years.

Rey also created 28 other ``Curious George'' books in collaboration with Alan Shelleck. These adventures also became an animated television series.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Rey once said she and her husband had a simple reason for creating the book: They needed money. More than 20 million ``Curious George'' books have been sold in 12 languages. Hans Augusto Rey, who illustrated the books, died in 1977.

``Margret lived to the fullest every minute of her long and productive life and enriched the lives of millions,'' said Nader Darehshori, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Houghton Mifflin.

The theme behind the ``Curious George'' books was elementary: A trouble-finding monkey who creates a mild uproar and has to be saved or saves the day. A prime example of the theme in the ``Curious George'' books can be found in ``Curious George Goes to the Hospital,'' in which George swallows a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and is run through a battery of hospital tests. The tale is designed to put at ease children who might face a similar crisis in real life.

Discussing the ``Curious George'' phenomenon, Hillel Stavis, a longtime friend who, with his wife, Donna Friedman, runs a shop called Curious George Goes to Wordsworth, a bookstore on Harvard Square, said: ``The artwork is endearing and it is pretty timeless. It actually looks quite contemporary now.

``It is also very nostalgic for the baby boomers, and it is an intriguing idea, a monkey that is very mischievous but not scary,'' added Stavis.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Rey met her husband as a girl and they married in 1935. Before her marriage, she studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, and art schools in Dusseldorf and Berlin. She also worked as a reporter and a photographer.

It was in Paris, though, that a publisher expressed interest in a comic drawing of a giraffe by Hans Augusto. The publisher then asked the couple to collaborate on a book for children. The book, ``Rafi et les Neuf Singes,'' published in 1939, was the model for ``Curious George,'' which two years later became a hit in the United States.

``We worked very closely together,'' she said in an interview in 1977, ``and it was hard to pull the thing apart and say who did what.''

Besides the ``Curious George'' series, Rey created five other books published, including ``Spotty'' and Pretzel.'' She also ran a Curious George merchandising program.

Rey left no known survivors, except, of course, for Curious George.

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PHOTO Margret Rey

Series considered ``timeless''