•Prunella Scales
Actress Prunella Scales, best known for her role as the long-suffering Sybil in the British TV comedy classic “Fawlty Towers”, has died aged 93, her family said today.
The actress passed away “peacefully at home in London” yesterday, her sons Samuel and Joseph said.
“She was watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died,” they said in a statement on X, adding her last days were “comfortable, contented and surrounded by love”.
Scales was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013 but continued to work for several years, including with her husband, the screen and stage actor Timothy West, reports AFP.
The couple were married for 61 years,, and West, who died in November 2024 aged 90, was to become her carer. They found time to film several series of the Channel 4 show, “Great Canal Journeys”.
But it was in the Bafta-winning “Fawlty Towers” as Sybil — the acerbic foil to her snobbish, accident-prone hotelier husband, Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese — that Scales engraved her place in UK hearts.
The original show, written by “Monty Python” star Cleese and his then-wife Connie Booth, ran for two series in 1975 and 1979, totalling only 12 episodes.
Set in a hotel in the southern seaside resort of Torquay, it became so beloved that whole lines can be spouted by Brits at random, usually provoking fits of laughter.
Cleese paid tribute in a statement in which he said he had been “very, very fond” of Scales.
She was “a really wonderful comic actress … Scene after scene she was absolutely perfect,” Cleese added.
There was praise too from Downing Street, with the prime minister’s spokesman saying Scales was “a part of the golden era for British comedy, someone whose talent was beamed into people’s homes over many years.”
In 2019, “Fawlty Towers” was named the greatest British sitcom ever by a panel of TV experts for “Radio Times” magazine.
The following year, however, one episode in which Basil Fawlty does a goosestepping impersonation of Adolf Hitler was taken down by the BBC for fear of creating offence.
Among her many acting credits over nearly 70 years, Scales played Queen Elizabeth II in the British film “A Question Of Attribution” as well as appearing in a one-woman show called “An Evening With Queen Victoria”.
She is survived by two sons, a stepdaughter, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
