Prunella Scales, the actor best known for playing Sybil Fawlty in the classic comedy series Fawlty Towers, has died aged 93.
Scales, who was married to fellow actor Timothy West, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2013.
The actor died “peacefully at home in London yesterday”, her sons Samuel and Joseph said.
“Our darling mother Prunella Scales died peacefully at home in London yesterday. She was 93,” a statement from her sons said.
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“Although dementia forced her retirement from a remarkable acting career of nearly 70 years, she continued to live at home. She was watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died. Pru was married to Timothy West for 61 years. He died in November 2024.
“She is survived by two sons and one stepdaughter, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
“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, who was born in Surrey in 1932, began her career as an assistant stage manager for the Bristol Old Vic theatre, having studied at its associated drama school.
Her mother, Catherine, was an actor and her father, John, was a cotton salesman who loved the theatre.
She told the Guardian in 2009: “Acting was always in the air. But when I got into the Bristol Old Vic my headmistress wrote to the director and said: ‘Are you sure this girl should be an actress? We wanted her to try for Cambridge.’ Of course, this was used as a stick to beat me with for the rest of my training.”
Following a number of film roles, including in the now-lost second-ever screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice from 1952, Scales broke into the mainstream in the television sitcom The Marriage Lines, which aired in the early 1960s, starring alongside Richard Briers.
As well as roles in the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Rumpole of the Bailey and TV’s Mapp and Lucia, Scales was best known for playing Sybil Fawlty in the John Cleese and Connie Booth-penned sitcom Fawlty Towers, in which she appeared between 1975-1979. In it, Scales memorably played the domineering Sybil, the wife of Cleese’s incompetent hotel boss Basil.
Scales also portrayed Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution – for which she earned a Bafta nomination in 1992 – and appeared in adverts for the supermarket chain Tesco for 10 years from 1995, playing a demanding shopper, Dotty.
Between 2014-2019, Scales and West helmed Channel 4’s Great Canal Journeys, which followed the couple on a series of canal and narrow boat journeys across the UK and Europe, and later further afield. In the final series of the programme, West said that Scales’s conditioned had worsened in recent times, and that she was also losing her hearing. – Guardian
