In 1974, when Prunella Scales was offered the iconic role of the domineering Sybil in “Fawlty Towers,” she was invited to meet the show’s creator and star, John Cleese.

Cleese, battling the flu at the time, received her at his Hyde Park Gardens apartment while resting in bed. He immediately inquired if Pru, who recently passed at 93, had read and enjoyed the scripts.

She responded enthusiastically, “They’re brilliant,” but had one pressing question: “Why did Sybil marry Basil?”

Cleese let out a groan, saying, “Oh God, I knew you’d ask that.”

This inquiry perfectly encapsulates Pru’s approach to acting. She never confined herself to being just a comedy performer or a West End luminary, despite excelling in both arenas.

Her priority was always to bring authenticity to her characters, whether she was in a comedic sitcom or a serious play. Whether portraying historical figures like Queen Victoria, or embodying the quirky character Dottie Turnbull in Tesco commercials, she was dedicated to representing genuine people.

She couldn’t accept Sybil Fawlty the way Cleese first wrote her, as a vacuous and lazy woman who spent most of her time gossiping or painting her nails while her husband ran himself ragged.

Prunella Scales (left) with John Cleese, Connie Booth and Andrew Sachs in Fawlty Towers

Prunella Scales with husband Timothy West in 2016. The pair met on the set of 1961 BBC costume drama She Died Young 

The character came alive when Prunella mapped out her past: ‘Her parents have been in catering and so she knows about running a boarding house, south coast, Eastbourne.

‘Sybil’s trouble is that she has married out of her class. She has been fooled by Fawlty’s flannel and, too late, she realises she is landed with an upper-class twit. 

‘Whereupon the rot sets in. But behind all her apparent disenchantment with Basil, there is some real affection for him.’

None of that was explicitly stated in the mere dozen episodes of the show’s total run. But it all rings true, because she conveyed it so vividly in her accent, her gestures, her eye rolls and her exasperated clucks.

‘I don’t think Sybil was a dragon,’ Prunella said. ‘She was an intelligent and funny woman, rather sexy in all those chic clothes.’

All of this came as a surprise to Cleese and his co-writer, Connie Booth, who was his wife at the time.

‘We were a little dubious after the first day’s rehearsal,’ he admitted. ‘We wondered if it was working. By the second day, we realised that the choices Pru was making probably worked better than what we had in mind.’

Her ability to make Sybil a fully rounded person lifted the show to the top tier of sitcom. 

Because she was so real, viewers believed more in all the characters, and the comedy became both funnier and more poignant.

But she paid a price. For the rest of her life, the public expected her to be like Sybil, both on and off stage.

Scales made the role her own after being cast in Fawlty Towers, reinventing Sybil into the icon still beloved by audiences today (pictured with Cleese and Ballard Berkeley)

Prunella Scales in a promotional shot for Hobson’s Choice, the 1954 film that was one of her earliest cinematic appearances

Scales pictured in the bittersweet ITV sitcom After Henry, which ran from 1988 to 1992

She appeared in the ITV made-for-TV film Natural Causes opposite George Cole in 1988

Scales as Iris Corliss in a promotional shot for the play Some Singing Blood, performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1992

Scales embraced the legacy of Fawlty Towers, seen here with the Austin 1100 that Basil Fawlty gave a whacking with a tree in 2006

That was a frustration when she was playing major roles – Portia in The Merchant Of Venice at the Old Vic in 1982, Coral Browne in Alan Bennett’s Single Spies at the National Theatre three years later.

She starred in primetime TV serials such as Mapp And Lucia (she was Miss Mapp, opposite Geraldine James), and the bittersweet sitcom about bereavement, After Henry.

But whatever she was doing, people who recognised her in the street imagined they were meeting the real Sybil Fawlty, and often expressed shock when she was neither stuck-up nor brusque: ‘They say, “Aren’t you nice!” in tones of pained surprise.’

After a time, Pru gave up explaining that she thought Sybil was nice too. ‘I didn’t think she was a dragon. I thought she was a saint and a heroine.’

And the show had an unexpected side effect, as she explained when she was invited onto Desert Island Discs in 1992: ‘It’s had rather a good effect on hotel management in this country.’ 

She was born Prunella Illingworth in June 1932, in Surrey, to well-off parents whose financial fortunes were on the wane.

According to family legend, her pregnant mother Bim played a trick on the village: she dressed up their cook, who was tiny, in a smock and asked her to sit in the pram. Then she trundled both pram and cook along the High Street, as a joke.

Bim (short for her childhood nickname, Bambino) was a frustrated actress herself, a former student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her husband John loved theatre too and when Pru was six her parents took her to see the ballet at Sadlers Wells.

She was smitten and longed to be a ballerina. The following year, though, with the outbreak of war, the family were evacuated to rural Devon and dancing lessons were out of the question. Instead, Pru decided to be an actress.

By then, the Illingworths could no longer afford a cook. ‘My grandfather had been a prosperous Bradford merchant,’ Pru said, ‘but he fell on hard times. My father only ever had what he earned.’

After the war, they rented a farmhouse in Kent without gas, electricity or running water. Bim often read aloud to her daughter, and they made jam together with fruit that grew in the garden.

One afternoon, spotting a pigeon pecking at the fruit, John grabbed his shotgun. He missed the bird with the first barrel but, as he hung the gun back up on its peg, the second barrel went off and blasted a hole in the ceiling – narrowly missing Bim in the bedroom above.

Prunella Scales reunited with her Fawlty Towers castmates to commemorate the show’s 30th anniversary in 2009

Prunella Scales performed as Queen Victoria more than 400 times in a one-woman play written for her (pictured) until 2007, when she began to struggle with remembering lines

Scales seen speaking to the then-Prince Charles at Clarence House in 2011. She received a CBE for services to drama in 1992

After training at the Old Vic theatre school, Pru quickly proved herself a versatile character actress, constantly in demand for repertory theatre and live television dramas. 

She was proud that, in her long career, she had only one spell of ‘resting’: aged 30, she spent three months packing margarine tubs into boxes.

By then, she had met the great love of her life, fellow actor Timothy West – who died last November, aged 90 – on the set of a 1961 BBC costume drama called She Died Young. 

Tim played a young buck whose only line was, ‘Can’t say I blame him, sir – Damnee, she’s a morsel!’

An early spell on Coronation Street followed for Pru, and years of juggling stage work with motherhood. She and Tim had two sons, Samuel and Joseph, with a daughter, Juliet, from Tim’s previous marriage.

They were a devoted couple. ‘I hate being alone,’ she said. ‘When Tim’s away, I miss him dreadfully.’ She admitted that, if he was on tour, she sometimes played recordings of his performances, and wept to hear his voice.

After a series of films in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Merchant Ivory production Howard’s End, Pru became the first actress to play Queen Elizabeth II on stage at the National Theatre, in Alan Bennett’s A Question Of Attribution, about the royal art expert and traitor Anthony Blunt, in 1988.

‘I don’t think the Queen ever came and saw me play her in the theatre,’ she said, ‘but I believe she’s now seen the play on tape. When I got my CBE [in 1992] she made a quite sweet, quite gentle remark about it.

The family fell in love with canal boating in the early 1970s. ‘Tim loves travel,’ she said, ‘and I’m a very nest-building sort of person, so this has been the most wonderful compromise.’

Prunella Scales and Timothy West in 1991. The pair were inseparable in their 61 years of marriage

Prunella Scales and Timothy West continued appearing on television together even after she stepped back from acting, filming several series of Great Canal Journeys with Channel Four

Scales pictured with Timothy West, in May 2024. West predeceased her in November last year

They lent their weight to the campaign to reopen the Kennet and Avon canal, from Bath to Newbury in Berkshire, and in 1990 were the first people to navigate its entire length.

The holiday hobby brought a consolation when Pru was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

After a year in her one-woman show, An Evening With Queen Victoria, she began to have difficulty remembering her lines. By 2009, when she was 67, she made her last appearance on the West End.

But five years later she and Tim, in the year of their golden wedding anniversary, began a series of narrowboat adventures for Channel 4, in Great Canal Journeys.

Their excursions took them all over Britain and then beyond, as far as Argentina and Vietnam. 

The shows were beloved by viewers, not only for their gentle pace and sometimes spectacular scenery, but for showing the truth about Pru’s dementia without despair or melodrama.

These travels, said Tim, enabled them to ‘make the most of our time together, doing the things we love’. 

And they gave us a glimpse of one of Britain’s greatest acting couples, simply happy in each other’s company.