Prunella Scales dies at 93. Actor best known for playing Sybil Fawlty in British sitcom Fawlty Towers
Later roles included Queen Elizabeth II in A Question of Attribution, Alan Bennett’s stage and TV drama about the queen’s art adviser, Anthony Blunt, who was also a Soviet spy. Scales played another British monarch in the one-woman stage show An Evening with Queen Victoria.
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Scales was a versatile stage performer whose theatre roles ranged from Shakespeare’s comedies to the morphine-addicted matriarch Mary Tyrone in a 1991 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
But she remained best known for Fawlty Towers. In 2006, Scales was guest of honour at the reopening of the Gleneagles Hotel in the English seaside resort of Torquay, the establishment whose memorably rude owner had inspired Cleese to create Basil Fawlty after a stay there in the 1970s.
Scales was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013. Between 2014 and 2019, she and her husband, actor Timothy West, explored waterways in Britain and abroad in the gentle travel show Great Canal Journeys. The program was praised for the way it honestly depicted Scales’ dementia.
West, her husband of 61 years, died in November 2024. Scales is survived by her sons, stepdaughter Juliet West, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
