Although it became virtually a weekly occurrence to find Queen Elizabeth II treading the boards in recent years, the first time a reigning monarch was portrayed on the contemporary British stage came when Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93, played Her Majesty in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution at the National Theatre in 1988.
She did so to the displeasure of the NT’s board, which had then lately added Royal to the title of the theatre as the artistic director, Richard Eyre, began his tenure. Eyre stuck to his guns in presenting the play on a double bill, Single Spies, with another Bennett piece, An Englishman Abroad, the stage version of Bennett’s TV play based on the friendship struck up between the actor Coral Browne (also played by Scales) and the spy Guy Burgess in Moscow in 1955.
Playing HMQ, as Bennett named her in the cast list, Scales, said Michael Billington, captured the monarch’s essence and her enigma, and audiences delighted in her subtle, sure-footed fencing with Bennett himself as the art historian Anthony Blunt (also a spy) on the paintings he supervised in her collection. She had views on Titian and Vermeer ... and Poussin, or “chicken”: “One’s just had it for lunch,” she said. “I suppose it’s fresh in the mind.”
By then, Scales was justly celebrated as another great figure of the age, Sybil Fawlty, wife of John Cleese’s irate hotel manager in the BBC’s Fawlty Towers, one of the most popular television sitcoms of the 1970s, written by Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth. As a brilliant comedy technician with a keen eye for class differences, Scales at first surprised, then pleased, Cleese, with her suggestion of presenting Sybil as coming from a notch or two below Basil, socially; much of the comedy then arose from a sort of tragic stalemate in their marriage.
Off-screen, Scales was married for more than 60 years to the actor Timothy West, who died in November, and they shared passions for the regional theatre, letter-writing (to each other, mostly), classical music and Britain’s waterways. They rarely appeared on stage together. When they did so, in Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the Bristol Old Vic and the NT in 1991, it was not a great success; artistically, they thrived more separately.
Prunella’s mother, Catherine Scales, was an actor and author of children’s books. Her father, John Illingworth, whose family had owned the Illingworth tobacco factory in Yorkshire, was an ex-army officer and cotton salesman who moved into insurance. Prunella was born in Sutton Abinger, Surrey, went to primary school in Dorking (she was evacuated to Devon during the second world war) and entered the Moira House girls’ school in 1942 at its wartime relocation in a hotel on Windermere, returning to the its original premises in Eastbourne, East Sussex, in 1945.
Scales, who adopted her mother’s surname for professional purposes, won a scholarship to the Old Vic school in 1949, made a professional debut as an aged cook in Jean Anouilh’s Traveller Without Luggage at the Bristol Old Vic in 1951 and a television debut in 1952 as Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, one of the BBC’s first screenings of a Jane Austen novel (coincidentally, her future father-in-law, Lockwood West, played Mr Collins).
After seasons in rep – she played Desdemona and Ibsen’s Nora in The Doll’s House at Salisbury – she appeared on the London stage in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, starring Ruth Gordon, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, at the Haymarket; she moved with the show to Broadway, where she also took acting classes with the celebrated teacher Uta Hagen.
Back in Britain, she played the 1956 season at Stratford-upon-Avon as Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice and Jaquenetta in Peter Hall’s production – his first at Stratford – of Love’s Labour’s Lost before joining the Oxford Playhouse and the Dundee Rep; she met Timothy West while doing a TV play in 1961 and married him two years later.
In 1961 she also played a bus conductor, Eileen Hughes, in five episodes of Coronation Street, before five series as Kate Starling, opposite Richard Briers, in the BBC’s Marriage Lines, written by Richard Waring. This amusing examination of the joys and pitfalls of early married life transformed her career.
Further West End appearances – in Arbuzov’s The Promise and Noël Coward’s Hay Fever (she was Jackie Coryton, the flapper, in a revival headed by Celia Johnson and Richard Vernon in 1968), Molnár’s The Wolf and Willy Russell’s Breezeblock Park – ran alongside her TV pre-eminence, and the raising of a young family (two boys), first in a house in Barnes near Hammersmith Bridge, then in Wandsworth.
There were only two series (six episodes in each) of Fawlty Towers, but Scales’s recriminatory warpath cry of “Basil!” rang across the decades without lumbering her with typecasting. She was far too good for that to happen.
She played a distressed actor pretending to be Mrs Patrick Campbell in Bamber Gascoigne’s misfired farce Big in Brazil at the Old Vic in 1984, West playing a Yorkshire thespian called Charlie Mucklebrass. But the couple enjoyed their greatest success together two years later in Ronald Eyre’s perfect revival at the Whitehall theatre (later filmed for television) of JB Priestley’s When We Are Married. They played one of three couples – the Parkers, the Helliwells and the Soppitts – celebrating a silver wedding anniversary that turns out to be phoney; none of them was legally married after all.
Free of Fawlty, Scales embarked on a wonderful TV adaptation by Gerald Savory of EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books, playing Elizabeth Mapp to Geraldine McEwan’s Lucia and Nigel Hawthorne’s Georgie. Between 1988 and 1992 she played a sort of merry widow in After Henry by Simon Brett, which had started on BBC Radio in 1985. An extreme, vengeful version of Sybil emerged in a television drama called Home Cooking (as part of the Unnatural Causes series in 1986) in which she played a nude sex scene with a commercial traveller and steamed her husband to death in a sauna.
She popped up in a few good films – Franklin Schaffner’s The Boys from Brazil (1978), about the postwar Nazi hunt, with Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier and James Mason; James Ivory’s Howards End (1992), as Aunt Juley, with her son Samuel playing Leonard Bast; and Mike Newell’s An Awfully Big Adventure (1994) based on a Beryl Bainbridge novel about the lost days of weekly rep, co-starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant.
But she became better known again on television in a brilliant series of adverts for Tesco, in which she played Dottie, a fussing, bespectacled mother to Jane Horrocks’s put-upon daughter. “Shall I put the bag in the car for you?” asks a shop assistant, after she’s loaded it with weighty comestibles for a foreign holiday. “No, she can get in herself,” says a furious Horrocks.
Scales brought as much attention to detail to Dottie as she did to HMQ and Sybil, and she always said such gigs financed her touring and stage work. She was the definitive Mrs Candour in The School for Scandal at the National in 1990; an acclaimed Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1993; a genteel ghost of a landlady in a housecoat (“Succulent – not a word to say to a married woman”) in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at the Piccadilly in 1999 (West was the bullying Goldberg); and another ghost-like eccentric, Mrs Gotobed, in Nina Bawden’s Carrie’s War at the Apollo in the West End in 2009.
When the Queen pinned the CBE insignia to her lapel at Buckingham Palace in 1992, she said to Scales, “I suppose you think you should be doing this.” As well as being appointed CBE, she was granted the Freedom of the City of London in 1999, and awarded honorary degrees at the universities of Bradford (1999) and East Anglia (2000).
Between 2014 and 2019, she and West appeared in Great Canal Journeys, a charming television series, in which the couple relived their life on canal boats and she referred to “a slight condition – I can’t remember sometimes”. West said this “sort of Alzheimer’s” had translated her into another version of the person he used to know, but that they made the most of their time together. As dementia took hold, she was still clambering on and off the boat at the locks on the Kennet and Avon, a canal they had played a part in saving in the 80s.
She is survived by their two sons, Samuel and Joseph.
• Prunella Margaret Rumney Scales, actor, born 22 June 1932; died 27 October 2025
