Obituary: Prunella Scales, actor who played Sybil in Fawlty Towers

It had been troubling him: what had brought together the chaotic Basil – rude to those he thought inferior, ingratiating to those he wanted to impress – with the shrewish Sybil, “my little nest of vipers”, who laughed like “someone machine-gunning a seal”? In one episode Basil reminisces about when they were first “manacled” together. “We used to laugh quite a lot,” he said. “Yes but not at the same time,” Sybil replied.

Fortunately, Scales had already invented the character’s back story and it won her the part. Sybil’s parents were lower middle-class owners of a boarding house, she told Cleese, and she had fallen for Basil because he appeared posh. Her disappointment that he was not, coupled with his frustration that she was much more competent at hotel management – and their 14-inch height difference – made for ripe comedy. “I didn’t think Sybil was a dragon,” Scales said. “I thought she was a saint.”

While a toxic screen marriage made her famous, Scales had a very happy 61-year union with the actor Timothy West that captivated new audiences late in life over 10 series of Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4 from 2014-19. Travelling by narrowboat was a hobby they had enjoyed since the mid-1970s and viewers found their pottering along the blue veins of green England (and, in later series, overseas) to be charming.

It was also tragically poignant. “Pru has a slight condition,” West said in the opening sequence. “She has difficulty remembering things.” She had been diagnosed with vascular dementia, which he had suspected as far back as 2001. The series charted her own slow journey into forgetfulness and his tender affection. There were few dry eyes after the penultimate episode when they sent lanterns down a river in memory of their parents. “Thank you for a lovely life,” she told him. “Oh, it’s a pleasure,” he said. “So have I had a lovely life.”

They had met in 1961 on the set of a dreadful BBC costume drama called She Died Young (Scales said the cast added the subtitle “And none too soon”). They had a “Polo mints and Times crossword flirtation”; his talent for letter-writing soon won her heart. He left his first wife, with whom he had a daughter, Juliet, and they were married in 1963, having two sons, Samuel and Joseph.

Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth was born in Surrey in 1932. Her mother was an actor until she married and gave her daughter the unusual name from the title of a play she had been in. When Scales appeared in Hobson’s Choice in 1954, Robert Donat asked if she was any relation to “Bim” Scales. Told it was her mother he sighed that it made him feel old.

At eight, she was evacuated to Devon, ending her hopes of becoming a ballerina. She decided to act instead and enrolled at the Old Vic Theatre School but found it hard. In 2005, she admitted that she had thought it “wrong to show off”. Scales also struggled financially at the school and sold her uncle’s stamp collection for £300 to pay the rent.

She joined the Bristol Old Vic in 1951 as an assistant stage manager, winning her first stage role as an elderly cook in Jean Anouilh’s Traveller Without Luggage. She made her West End debut in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker but blossomed in repertory theatre. Scales said she had once been forced to take a job wrapping margarine for a market research company, but since then had not been out of acting work for 30 years.

In 1963, she appeared in the BBC comedy Marriage Lines with Richard Briers, but still preferred the stage. “In the theatre you get a chance to have another go,” she said. “I love long runs.” It is ironic that her most famous television role lasted only 12 episodes.

Fawlty Towers brought more television work, notably the 1985 series Mapp & Lucia, based on the novels by EF Benson, and Simon Brett’s comedy After Henry, in which she played a widow caught between her mother and teenage daughter.

West was a guest star in an episode of After Henry. Brett recalled their contrasting styles. “She was meticulous,” he said. “She’d rehearse in exact detail and do the same for every take. Tim’s approach was much more casual and less predictable, but the two styles blended brilliantly.”

Brett added that he had never met an actor who spoke as quickly as she did. “The result was that every script in the first series was a minute short. Subsequently, I wrote her much longer speeches than I would for anyone else, confident that she would glide seamlessly through them.”

Her heart, however, belonged to the theatre. “I want to die on the eighth curtain call,” she said in 2009. “I just hope I am somewhere near the middle and reasonably good in the part.” Her decline in memory prevented that, but in 2024, two months before West died after a fall, she took her final ovation at the Tabard Theatre studio in west London, where she had provided a voiceover for a dramatisation of Queen Victoria’s letters. Asked in advance how she would feel about hearing applause one last time, she replied: “Grateful.”

Prunella Scales, actor, was born on 22 June 1932 and died on 27 October 2025 at the age of 93

Photograph by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images