The role of Sybil, the wife of the manic hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty in the 1970s BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers, brought Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, her greatest fame.
She gave the domineering character – regarded by her husband, played by John Cleese, as a fire-breathing dragon, constantly thwarting his snobbish attempts to take their establishment upmarket and eradicate the “riff-raff” – a quality that the programme’s writers, Cleese and his real-life wife, Connie Booth (who played the maid, Polly), had not foreseen when the first series was made in 1975.
“It was my idea that she was a cut below [Basil] socially – not very well educated, but very careful about her speech,” explained Scales. “What she had fallen for was Basil’s poshness, and he had fallen for her because she was attractive, in a blowsy kind of way.”
Sybil, complete with a laugh that her husband described as sounding like “someone machine-gunning a seal”, had the upper hand and was always one step ahead of Basil, who was rude to guests and often teetered on the edge of insanity in his frustration.
While Basil was digging himself further into another disaster, she could often be heard on the telephone, engaged in a private conversation. “I know... I know... I know,” almost became a catchphrase. But it was never long before she would enter the fray.
Particularly memorable is her putdown in an episode titled “The Psychiatrist” – in the second and final series, broadcast in 1979 – after she finds Basil in a female guest’s bathroom, trying to fix the light. As he extends his arm into the bedroom to feel for the switch, he instead plants his hand on the young woman’s breast.
At that very moment, Sybil appears and tells him, in a world-weary voice: “If you’re going to grope a girl, have the gallantry to stay in the room while you’re doing it.”
Later, she arrives on the scene seconds after Basil jumps out of a cupboard, grabs the woman from behind with his soot-covered hand, thinking she is someone else – and leaves a black handprint on her breast.
When Sybil then finds her husband hiding in the woman’s wardrobe, she tells him: “Do you really imagine, even in your wildest dreams, that a girl like this could possibly be interested in an ageing, brilliantined stick insect like you?”
Huge care and detail went into the episodes, each of which took six weeks to write. Cleese and Booth wisely ended Fawlty Towers after two series, ensuring it went out on a high, with its standards intact (the couple had actually divorced before completing the second run).
The sitcom – which also featured Andrew Sachs as the non-English-speaking Spanish waiter, Manuel – went on to top a British Film Institute list of the 100 best television programmes, as voted for by industry professionals.
However, Scales admitted she had found the role of Sybil to be a millstone round her neck. She once told me: “Although Fawlty Towers was a wonderful programme, Sybil was quite a limited part, and if I really believed I’d never get a better one, I’d probably shoot myself! But, actually, I’ve had many better ones, before and since.”
These included her performance as the “not amused” monarch in the one-woman stage show An Evening with Queen Victoria, which Scales first performed at the Old Vic in 1980, as well as playing the same character on television in the children’s feature-length drama Station Jim (2001) and the drama-documentary Looking for Victoria (2003).
Scales was also nominated for a Bafta TV Best Actress award for her role as Queen Elizabeth II in the 1991 BBC adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play A Question of Attribution, about Anthony Blunt, a member of the Cambridge spy ring working for the Soviet Union who was also employed as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. She had played the same character in the National Theatre production in 1988.
After Fawlty Towers, Scales had two other notable television comedy successes. First, she played the formidable Miss Elizabeth Mapp, opposite Geraldine McEwan’s determined newcomer Emmeline Lucas, in two series of Mapp & Lucia (1985-86), based on EF Benson’s novels about the rivalry between two women vying for superiority in 1920s and 1930s town society.
Then, in After Henry (1988-92), written by Simon Brett, Scales acted the part of Sarah, a fortysomething widow coping with her teenage daughter Clare (Janine Wood) and her demanding mother Eleanor (Joan Sanderson) – all living on different floors of the same house. She was also in the original, radio version (1985-89) of the three-generation sitcom.
Scales was born Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth in Sutton Abinger, Surrey, in 1932. Her father, John, was a sales manager with the cotton manufacturer Tootal Broadhurst Lee, and her mother, Catherine, nee Scales – known to friends and family as “Bim” – had acted professionally, at one time alongside Robert Donat at the Liverpool Playhouse, after being born and brought up in Yorkshire.
During the Second World War, Prunella, her mother and her younger brother moved to Devon, then to Westmorland (now Cumbria), where she was awarded a scholarship to Moira House, a private school that had relocated from Eastbourne to Windermere during the hostilities. While there, she acted in its plays.
On finishing her schooling back in Eastbourne, Prunella won a scholarship to train at the Old Vic Theatre School in London (1949-51), then – taking her mother’s maiden name – joined the repertory company at Bristol Old Vic, making her professional debut there as a maid in Traveller Without Luggage (1951).
After a short run in Worthing, she made her film debut as a Highland village schoolteacher in the romantic comedy Laxdale Hall. This was followed by her first television appearance, as Lydia Bennet in a six-part BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1952).
As well as rep in Salisbury and Huddersfield, more screen appearances followed, including the role of Vicky Hobson in the film Hobson’s Choice (1953), directed by David Lean and starring Charles Laughton and John Mills.
West End theatre also beckoned, with Scales first acting the part of Ermengarde in the original production of Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Matchmaker (Haymarket Theatre, 1954-55), directed by Tyrone Guthrie. She travelled to New York with the cast for the Broadway production (Royale Theatre, 1955-56) and, while there, took acting classes with Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio.
There followed a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon (1956), the role of Aline in The Man of Distinction (Prince’s Theatre, 1957) and multiple parts in the revue Not to Worry (Garrick Theatre, 1962).
Scales met fellow actor Timothy West in 1961, when his first marriage was on the rocks. Two years later, following his divorce, the pair married. This was just as Scales – who had appeared briefly in Coronation Street as a bus conductor, Eileen Hughes (1961) – was being seen by millions of television viewers in the sitcom Marriage Lines (1963-66) as Kate Starling, a young bride coming to terms with domestication, alongside Richard Briers as her husband, George.
Dozens of television roles followed, along with occasional appearances in films, including The Boys from Brazil (1978), The Wicked Lady (the 1983 remake starring Faye Dunaway), A Chorus of Disapproval (a 1989 adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn’s play about amateur thespians), Howards End (1992, as Aunt Juley), and An Awfully Big Adventure (1995, from the Beryl Bainbridge novel).
Also known to television viewers as Dotty Turnbull in Tesco commercials (1994-2004), Scales was cast in scores of radio plays and series over more than 50 years. She and Patricia Routledge acted in the original radio production of Ladies of Letters (1997) and various sequels (1999-2010), but not in the television version.
Scales also played the barrister’s wife, Hilda – “she who must be obeyed” – alongside her real-life husband in the title role in four Rumpole of the Bailey radio plays (2003).
She shared with West an enthusiasm for narrowboats, and the couple took their travels to television in various factual series, including Kennet and Avon (1991), Waterworld (2000-08) and Great Canal Journeys (2014-19).
Longtime Labour Party supporters, the couple were often seen campaigning at general elections. Both frequently said that television work – which, in any case, they chose carefully – allowed them to take less-well-paid stage jobs. The couple frequently supported fundraising campaigns for regional theatre.
Scales, who was made a CBE in 1992 and was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013, is survived by their two sons, Samuel, an actor, and Joe, a teacher, as well as Juliet, her stepdaughter.
Prunella Scales, actor, born 22 June 1932, died 27 October 2025
