Lynne Reid Banks, author of ‘The Indian in the Cupboard,’ dies at 94

Lynne Reid Banks, a British writer whose best-selling, sometimes contested works ranged from the novel “The L-Shaped Room” to “The Indian in the Cupboard” and its sequels, a chapter-book series about a boy and his animated plastic figurine that was read by millions of children on both sides of the Atlantic, died April 4 in Surrey, England. She was 94.

The cause was breast cancer, said Omri Stephenson, her youngest son, for whom the protagonist in “The Indian in the Cupboard” was named.

Banks, a onetime actress and television reporter, made her literary debut in 1960 with “The L-Shaped Room,” a novel about a young, unmarried woman who goes to live during her pregnancy in a boardinghouse room of the shape described in the title.

The book became a 1962 British film starring Leslie Caron in a rare dramatic role for the French-born actress-dancer and thrust Banks to fame. She went on to write what she described as “book after nonbest-selling book” until she “stumbled upon the idea,” as she put it, “of bringing a toy plastic American Indian to life in a magic cupboard.”

“The Indian in the Cupboard” appeared in 1980 and was followed by four sequels, “The Return of the Indian” (1986), “The Secret of the Indian” (1989), “The Mystery of the Cupboard” (1993) and “The Key to the Indian” (1998).

For years those volumes were staples of library shelves, recounting to young readers the adventures of Omri and Little Bear, the first of many figurines that come alive when Omri places them in his cupboard and turns an ornate key.

In 1995, “The Indian in the Cupboard” was adapted into a film directed by Frank Oz. A review by New York Times film critic Janet Maslin captured what admirers saw as the magic at the core of the story:

“As ‘E.T.’ did,” she wrote, referring to the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie about a boy and his extraterrestrial friend, “‘The Indian in the Cupboard’ imagines what it would be like to have a wondrous hidden companion, the kind that stays in a boy’s room all day while the boy goes to school.”

Belinda Reid Banks, an only child, was born in London on July 31, 1929. Her father, of Scottish heritage, was a doctor, and her mother, whose family was Irish, was an actress.

Banks started her education at a Catholic boarding school before being evacuated with her mother to Saskatoon, a city in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, to avoid bombings of London during World War II. Her father, as a physician, remained behind.

In Canada, Banks said, she was entranced by the idea of the Wild West, which mixed in her imagination with stories her mother had told her – the foundation, perhaps, of Banks’s later books for children.

“I was brought up to think we really shared the world with … fairies and elves and so on – that they were all around us,” she told the Times in 1993. “Fairy tales were my young mythology, and the pioneer West was my teenage mythology.”

After five years in Canada, Banks returned to England, where she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She initially followed her mother into a stage career but was forced to change course when her father died suddenly.

In search of more reliable income, she became a reporter for the television outlet that is now ITV. She was one of few women on the British airwaves at the time, and, annoyed by the tedium of the inconsequential assignments allowed to her, began writing “The L-Shaped Room” during her spare time.

Years later, she expressed regret about the way she had depicted a Black character who lives at the boardinghouse with the protagonist. “There are certain aspects of the book now, in my treatment of him, that embarrass me,” Banks told an interviewer.

“Everyone assumed that I’d had a baby, even people who’d known me for years. I was getting strange letters, like, ‘My dear, you have got us all guessing …’” she told the Independent. “My mother begged me not to publish under my own name. Everybody thought it was me and everybody still does. It was all pure imagination.”

In the early 1960s, Banks met her future husband, Chaim Stephenson, an English sculptor who at the time was living in Israel. She accompanied him back to Israel and lived for nearly nine years on a kibbutz, teaching English as another language, before they returned in 1971 to England, where she pursued her literary career in earnest.