The
accomplished classical actress had a perfect ear and the ability to
effortlessly pull off demanding jokes. Her performance as Sybil alongside John
Cleese in Fawlty Towers was one of sitcoms’ finest
Mark
Lawson
Tue 28
Oct 2025 15.28 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/oct/28/prunella-scales-tribute-sybil-fawlty-towers
Prunella
Scales portrayed two of Britain’s greatest monarchs on TV: Queen Victoria and
Queen Elizabeth II. She was the first dramatic actor to play the latter on
television, and won a Bafta nomination for doing so.
However,
Scales, who has died aged 93, knew that public memory of her would be shaped by
another woman. One who made those two royals look powerless – the self-declared
domestic and hospitality industry empress, Sybil Fawlty, wife of Basil, owner
of the worst hotel in Torquay in Fawlty Towers, in which she co-starred with
John Cleese, who also co-wrote with Connie Booth.
Though
occupying only a few months of work in a seven-decade career that stretched
from Lydia Bennet in a 1952 BBC Pride and Prejudice to a cameo in ITV’s The
Royal (2011), the dozen episodes of the 1975 and 1979 series of Fawlty Towers
have achieved rerun immortality. They have become a template for perfection in
sitcom writing and performances, including Scales’s.
In naming
the character, Cleese brought into play the classical associations of various
Sybils with prophecy, longevity, guarding the gates of hell and, above all,
inducing terror in mortal men. Especially effective at the last of these,
Scales, an accomplished classical stage actor, knowingly channelled these
mythical women.
Sybil
cowed her husband with what might be called a Basilisk stare. The single word
of another character’s name might not seem the most promising basis for a
national catchphrase, but Scales created one from “Basil!”. All professional
impressionists and many amateur ones at pubs and bus stops soon had it in their
repertoire.
Scales
was especially skilful in the elasticity of her delivery. Sometimes she barked
so hard and fast that “Basil” seemed to have only one syllable. But elongating
words like an opera singer gave Sybil another of her signature tics: the
gossipy, “Oh, I knoooooow!”, that would punctuate phone calls to unseen
friends. Further evidence of her perfect ear came when Basil was given a line
about Sybil’s laugh sounding like “someone machine-gunning a seal.” It de facto
became a demanding stage direction for Scales – which she pulled off
effortlessly.
At script
meetings these days, there would be concerns about the characterisation of
Sybil being misogynistic or a stereotypical henpecker, and Cleese has said that
the first script was rejected by the BBC partly on the grounds that it depicted
a standard marital battleground.
In fact,
the Cleese and Booth scripts were part of a trend in TV comedy of that era to
give women strength and agency by dramatising their dominance over feckless
men. Scales’s portrayal won sympathy for Mrs Fawlty by showing the character’s
imperious manner to be a reasonable response to the snivelling idiocies and
deceits of her husband. There was deliberate physical comedy in the 6ft 5in
Cleese shrivelling at the voice of the 5ft 3in Scales.
That
stature made her exactly the right height for Elizabeth II. Her portrayal of
the then current monarch in A Question of Attribution (BBC One, 1991) – adapted
by Alan Bennett from his stage play in which she had appeared at the National
Theatre three years earlier – came with multiple degrees of difficulty.
Some
conservative broadcasting grandees balked at the thought of dramatising a
living monarch, which, outside of comedy lookalikes such as Jeanette Charles,
had long been a taboo in English culture. And whereas theatre is a more
artificial medium, Scales was playing her on TV alongside appearances of the
real Queen on news bulletins and the annual Christmas Day broadcast. Scales,
though, managed to be a spitting image without ever risking seeming like
Spitting Image.
Though
four inches taller than the famously diminutive Victoria, Scales captured
everything else in the 2003 two-hour drama-documentary Looking for Victoria,
directed by Louise Osmond, in which the actor was shown researching her stage
show about the monarch between fictional interludes.
Scales
brought to her screen work comic technique perfected in theatre. But TV also
allowed her to play a choice part that had eluded her on stage: as Marion, a
woman descending into alcoholism across the three successive Christmas Eve
parties depicted in the 1985 BBC One seasonal treat production of Alan
Ayckbourn’s 1972 play, Absurd Personal Singular.
Scales
appeared on screen with her husband, the actor Timothy West, in her last
substantial TV contribution, a long-running Channel 4 travelogue, Great Canal
Journeys (2014-21). The show began happily, with the couple celebrating their
50th wedding anniversary and revisiting honeymoon sites, but became
progressively more poignant as subsequent series were candid about the
diagnosis and progress of Scales’s dementia, becoming the last public service
of a great career in raising awareness of the condition and its management.
Millions
of Britons will have heard the word “Basil!” echoing happily in their heads
today, a tribute to one of many great creations of a consummate comedy
performer.
Fawlty Towers actor Prunella Scales dies aged 93
Actor portrayed Sybil Fawlty and later charmed
viewers with her canal boat journeys alongside husband Timothy West
Hannah J Davies
Tue 28 Oct 2025 16.00 GMT
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 on
Monday, her sons, Samuel and Joseph, said.
A statement to the PA Media news agency said:
“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. 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 a
now-lost 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 and 1979. In it,
Scales memorably played the domineering Sybil, the wife of Cleese’s incompetent
hotel boss Basil.
Cleese was among those who paid tribute to Scales
following the news of her death. In a statement, he said: “How very sad. Pru
was a really wonderful comic actress. I’ve recently been watching a number of
clips of Fawlty Towers whilst researching a book. Scene after scene she was
absolutely perfect.”
He added: “She was a very sweet lady, who spent a
lot of her life apologising. I used to tease her about it. I was very, very
fond of her.”
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 Tesco for 10 years from
1995, playing a demanding shopper, Dotty.
Between 2014 and 2019, Scales and West presented
Channel 4’s Great Canal Journeys, which followed the couple on a series of
canal and narrowboat journeys across the UK and Europe, and later further
afield. In the final series of the programme, West said that Scales’s condition
had worsened in recent times, and that she was also losing her hearing.
Downing Street passed on its condolences to
Scales’ family, with Keir Starmer’s official spokesperson saying she was “a
part of the golden era for British comedy, someone whose talent was beamed into
people’s homes over many years”.
The broadcaster Gyles Brandreth remembered her as
“a funny, intelligent, interesting, gifted human being”, while Jon Petrie, the
director of comedy at the BBC, called her “a national treasure whose brilliance
as Sybil Fawlty lit up screens and still makes us laugh today”.
Corinne Mills, the interim chief executive at the
Alzheimer’s Society, said: “We are deeply saddened by the news that Prunella
Scales – a true British icon – has died.
“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.
“We are profoundly grateful for the awareness she
helped to raise and send our heartfelt condolences to her loved ones.”
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