Prunella Scales, Actress from Classic Sitcom Fawlty Towers, Dies
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, Prunella Scales, who played Sybil Fawlty in the classic comedy Fawlty Towers, has passed away at the age of 93. Scales was married to her co-star Timothy West and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2013. Her sons, Samuel and Joseph, confirmed her death in London earlier this week in a public statement.
Scales was born in 1932 in Surrey. After studying at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, she began her professional career as a stage assistant. Her mother, Katherine, was an actress, and her father, John, was a cotton salesman.
In 2009, she told The Guardian:
“Acting was always around me. But when I entered the Old Vic in Bristol, my school head wrote a letter to the director there saying, ‘Are you sure this girl should become an actress? We hoped she would try for Cambridge.’ Of course, that letter haunted me through the rest of my education.”
Scales appeared in several films, including a now-lost 1952 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and starred in the early 1960s comedy series The Marriage Lines. She also featured in the BBC radio adaptation Rumpole of the Bailey and the TV series Mapp and Lucia. However, it was her role as Sybil Fawlty opposite John Cleese in Fawlty Towers (1975–1979) that brought her fame, portraying Cleese’s domineering and strict wife.
She also played Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution and was nominated for a BAFTA in 1992. From 1995 for about a decade, she appeared in Tesco supermarket commercials as the demanding shopper “Dotty.”
Scales and her husband hosted the Channel 4 series Great Canal Journeys from 2014 to 2019. In the final season, West mentioned that Scales was gradually losing her hearing.
