Prunella Scales, the English actor best known for portraying Sybil Fawlty in the acclaimed sitcom Fawlty Towers, has died aged 93.
The actor died “peacefully at home in London yesterday”, her sons Samuel and Joseph said in a statement, adding that their mother had been watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died.
“Our darling mother Prunella Scales died peacefully at home in London yesterday. She was 93. Although dementia forced her retirement from a remarkable acting career of nearly 70 years, she continued to live at home,” they said.
“We would like to thank all those who gave Pru such wonderful care at the end of her life: her last days were comfortable, contented and surrounded by love.”
Scales rose to fame across two seasons of the Bafta-winning comedy series between 1975 and 1979, as the bossy wife to John Cleese’s eccentric hotelier, Basil Fawlty.
Cleese described his former co-star as “a really wonderful comic actress,” adding: “Scene after scene she was absolutely perfect.”
As Sybil, Scales cemented her career as the queen of British television sitcoms with her big hair, high heels, vicious laugh and domineering presence. Set in an eccentric hotel in Torquay, Devon, Fawlty Towers follows the dysfunctional management team’s attempts to run the hotel as they encounter demanding guests and absurd situations.
Scales also played a sly Queen Elizabeth II on stage and then on television, in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, for which she was nominated for a Bafta TV award.
Jon Petrie, director of comedy at the BBC, remembered Scales as a “national treasure whose brilliance as Sybil Fawlty lit up screens and still makes us laugh today”.
Broadcaster Gyles Brandreth has remembered Prunella Scales as “a funny, intelligent, interesting, gifted human being”. Sharing some photos of the actress on X/Twitter, he wrote: “This is a snap I took last year of Prunella Scales with Queen Camilla at Lamb House in Rye – we were celebrating Mapp & Lucia in which Pru had starred.”
Corinne Mills, interim chief executive officer for Alzheimer’s Society, praised Scales for raising awareness of dementia, which she was diganosed with in 2013.
“Prunella was an inspiration not just for her achievements on screen, but because she spoke so openly about living with dementia, shining an important light on the UK’s biggest killer,” said Mills.
Born Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth in 1932 to actress Catherine Scales and army lieutenant John Richardson Illingworth, Scales was educated, thanks to a scholarship, at Moira House Girls’ School in Eastbourne, where her mother got a job as an under-matron. Scales went straight to drama school instead of university, attending London’s Old Vic with another scholarship, and then training under Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York.
Scales started her career in 1951 as an assistant stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic before turning her attention to stage and screen roles.
Her career break came in the early Sixties sitcom Marriage Lines, starring opposite Richard Briers as a pair of newlyweds, who are bored with domestic life.
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After the success of Fawlty Towers, Scales worked with Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne for the television adaptation of EF Benson’s stories of Mapp & Lucia, which aired on ITV between 1985 and 1986. As Miss Elizabeth Mapp, Scales played a snobby socialite who ran the social life at the fictional town of Tilling-on-Sea.
Scales met her husband of 61 years, the late actor Timothy West, while filming a BBC television play called She Died Young, in 1961. The couple married in 1963, and have two sons, actor Samuel West, and Joseph West. Timothy died in November 2024 from a brain injury following a fall.
The couple starred together in several acting roles as a powerhouse duo, including in the play 1984 Big In Brazil at the Old Vic Theatre in London, and several BBC Radio 4 plays.
In her longest sitcom role, Scales played the widow Sarah France, heroine of the ITV drama After Henry, which aired between 1988 and 1992. The series followed a fortysomething Sarah caught in a bind between her manipulative mother and teenage daughter, who both demanded her attention.
Other notable TV roles included the long-running documentary series Horizon , as Florence Hastings, lady in waiting to Queen Victoria, the satirical sketch show On the Margin and 1972’s Country Matters, which was set just after the First World War and starred Ian McKellen.
In her most recent Scales made a voice cameo in Queen, a stage dramatisation of Queen Victoria’s letters, which finished its run in 2024 in London. She voiced Queen Victoria.
Scales played the character more than 400 times in An Evening With Queen Victoria, a play written for her by Katrina Hendrey in 1979.
She played Queen Victoria on several more occasions, including in the BBC drama-documentary Victoria: An Intimate History, which aired in 2003.
Between 2014 and 2021, Scales and her husband appeared in the travel documentary series Great Canal Journeys, in which they travelled on narrowboats around the UK’s canal network. In the final series of the programme, West said that Scales’s condition had worsened, and that she was also losing her hearing.
Scales was diagnosed with vascular dementia, a common type of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain, in 2013. West, the actor’s late husband, wrote of her condition in his 2023 memoir, Pru and Me, which gave an insight into their 60-year love story, Scales’s memory and her taking a step back from acting.
She is survived by two sons and one stepdaughter, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
