Prunella Scales: From Fawlty Towers to Great Canal Journeys

Prunella Scales, who died at the age of 93, was one of Britain’s finest comic actors.

But despite a long and distinguished career on stage and screen, she will inevitably be remembered as Sybil Fawlty in the 1970s TV comedy, Fawlty Towers.

It was Sybil’s mission in life to keep tabs on her “stick insect” husband Basil – played by John Cleese – between cigarette-fuelled phone conversations with her friend, Audrey.

It fell to her to placate guests who had been shouted at, totally ignored or, in some cases, throttled by Basil when in one of his more manic moods.

Her nightmarish laugh, gravity-defying hairdo and ferocious temper were part of a carefully constructed character that ranks as a comic masterpiece.

And while many actors would have distanced themselves from too close an association with a single role, Scales always expressed her delight in having been part of the Fawlty Towers experience.

Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth was born near Guildford on 22 June 1932.

It was a family deeply in love with the theatre – with her mother, Bim Scales, a former actor who’d given it all up for marriage and children.

Bright and bookish, after wartime evacuation to the Lake District, Prunella attended Moira House Girls School in Eastbourne.

In 1949, she won a scholarship to the Old Vic Theatre School and – two years later – secured a position as an assistant stage manager.

This was to the fury of her former headmistress in Eastbourne, who had hoped she would apply to Cambridge and wrote to the theatre to tell them so.

At drama school, Scales had been thought of as a junior character actor rather than an obvious Juliet.

“We all wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn,” she later told her biographer, “but I wasn’t attractive and nobody fancied me.”

Young Prunella also hid her middle-class roots, conscious that directors were beginning to look for a new kind of earthy credibility in their actors.

But she started picking up small roles in plays, and, while rehearsing for a part at Worthing’s Connaught Theatre, she met Andrew Sachs, who would later star as Manuel, the Spanish waiter, in Fawlty Towers.

There was an early television appearance in 1952, as Lydia Bennet in a BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, which featured Peter Cushing – better known for his roles in horror movies – as Mr Darcy.

And her first big screen roles came a year later – in romantic comedy, Laxdale Hall, and David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, opposite Charles Laughton.

Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, she was rarely out of work – appearing on stage, film and television, including a brief stint as a bus conductor, Eileen Hughes, in Coronation Street.

She also met fellow actor Timothy West.

After what Prunella described as “a mild Times crossword and Polo mints flirtation”, they got together, and married in 1963.

Her big TV break came with Marriage Lines, a BBC sitcom about a newly married couple, George and Kate Starling.

Scales appeared opposite Richard Briers, then one of the biggest stars in television comedy. The show proved hugely popular and ran for five years.

Then came Fawlty Towers, which propelled her to iconic status.

John Cleese and his then wife, Connie Booth, had submitted the first script of Fawlty Towers to the BBC.

Actress Bridget Turner had been approached to play Sybil Fawlty but she had turned it down and Scales auditioned for the role.

She later remembered that Cleese was a hard taskmaster.

“John, quite rightly, was extremely rigorous about learning the script, and if you didn’t, he could get quite cross, which was fair enough.”

Only 12 episodes were ever made.

The first series, which aired in 1975, failed to win huge audiences but, as it continued, its hilarious mix of absurd pratfalls and embarrassing situations grew in popularity.

Scales thought hard about how to play Sybil Fawlty, and decided that her social background had to be inferior to her husband Basil’s.

At first, John Cleese and his wife and fellow writer Connie Booth were unsure about the treatment.

“Once they heard the first reading in rehearsal,” recalled Scales, “they were sold on the idea.”

Later in her career, she was, all too often, called upon to play “dragons” and “old bags” when she hankered after more glamorous roles.

But when asked what she thought was the high point of her career, Scales had no hesitation in picking Sybil Fawlty.

“It was a tough job,” she insisted, “but I’m still proud of it.” She even thought it helped get the paying public into theatres.

“I like to think that if the public have seen you in one thing they’ll come and see you in another,” she said.

After Fawlty Towers, Scales continued to work in television, including a stint as the frumpy Elizabeth Mapp in ITV’s Mapp and Lucia.

Her voice was also regularly heard on radio, notably the BBC Radio 4 sitcom, After Henry, which subsequently transferred to television, and Ladies of Letters, with Patricia Routledge, which became an intrinsic part of Woman’s Hour.

Scales appeared in at two major royal roles; as Queen Elizabeth in the BBC production of Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, and as Queen Victoria in a one-woman show that she performed 400 times.

She once received a letter from one of Queen Elizabeth’s security men who confessed that when Scales came on stage, he stood up.

“It was a knee-jerk reaction,” she explained. “I was thrilled.”

In 1995, she began starring as Dotty Turnbull in a series of TV adverts for supermarket giant Tesco – which paid her partly in vouchers.

The campaign, which ran for nine years, was cited as the biggest factor in propelling it to market leadership in the mid 1990s.

Scales later came in for some gentle criticism for taking part in the Tesco adverts, when she backed a campaign to stop local shops closing in her area of London.

One of her finest performances came in Breaking the Code, the film about the Bletchley Park wartime codebreakers.

She appears as Alan Turing’s mother, who embodies a society that treated homosexual acts as a crime, an attitude that eventually led to his death.

Away from acting, Scales was a committed campaigner.

She served as president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and she was a lifelong Labour Party supporter, who counted Neil Kinnock as a “dear friend”.

With Timothy West, she made 10 series of Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4.

The programmes took viewers on gentle journeys through the inland waterways of Britain and – in later episodes – Egypt, India and Cambodia.

In the programmes, Scales told how her short-term memory was beginning to fade.

Her husband had noticed it first, when she began missing her lines in a production of A Woman of No Importance in 2003.

But the problem took a long time to get diagnosed.

In 2014, Timothy West confirmed that Prunella was suffering from vascular dementia. Before long, she had difficulty remembering when her sons were born or what year she had got married.

The couple appeared together on BBC Radio 4 to discuss how people could best cope with the condition.

The family put on a brave face in public, with West insisting that the core of their relationship had not altered.

“I’ve got to know him better and better and better,” agreed Scales.

A decade later, they celebrated 60 years of marriage, but her condition had reached a point where she knew little of her surroundings.

And, in November 2024, West died at the age of 90.

Until then, Prunella and her husband had been able to live independently in the marital home in Wandsworth.