Prunella Scales, who played Sybil Fawlty in British sitcom ‘Fawlty Towers,’ dies at 93
-
Click here to listen to this article - Share via
- Prunella Scales, the formidable Sybil Fawlty in the beloved British sitcom “Fawlty Towers,” died Monday at 93.
- Although only 12 episodes aired in 1975 and 1979, the show is regularly cited as one of television’s greatest comedies.
- Scales maintained a distinguished 70-year career before vascular dementia led to her retirement in 2013.
LONDON — Actor Prunella Scales, best known as acid-tongued Sybil Fawlty in the classic British sitcom “Fawlty Towers,” has died, her children said Tuesday. She was 93 and had lived with dementia for many years.
Scales’ sons, Samuel and Joseph West, said she died “peacefully at home in London” on Monday.
June Lockhart, the perennial TV mom who consoled her son Timmy and his faithful pet collie in ‘Lassie’ and explained the galaxy to her children in ‘Lost in Space,’ has died.
“Although dementia forced her retirement from a remarkable acting career of nearly 70 years, she continued to live at home,” her sons said. “She was watching ‘Fawlty Towers’ the day before she died.”
Scales’ career included early roles in a 1952 television version of “Pride and Prejudice” and the 1954 film comedy “Hobson’s Choice,” followed by her TV breakthrough starring opposite Richard Briers in “Marriage Lines,” a popular 1960s sitcom about a newlywed couple.
In “Fawlty Towers” she played the exasperated wife of hapless Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, whose efforts to run a seaside hotel inevitably escalated into chaos. Only 12 episodes were made, in 1975 and 1979, but it is regularly cited as one of the funniest sitcoms of all time.
Cleese remembered Scales as “a really wonderful comic actress” and “a very sweet lady.”
British actor Timothy West, who played wartime leader Winston Churchill on screen three times and appeared in numerous Shakespeare plays, has died. He was 90.
“I’ve recently been watching a number of clips of ‘Fawlty Towers’ whilst researching a book,” Cleese said in a statement. “Scene after scene she was absolutely perfect.”
Scales also starred as the small-town social powerhouse Elizabeth Mapp in “Mapp & Lucia,” a 1985 TV adaptation of E.F. Benson’s 1930s series of comic novels.
Later roles included Queen Elizabeth II in “A Question of Attribution,” Alan Bennett’s stage and TV drama about the queen’s art advisor, Anthony Blunt, who was also a Soviet spy. Scales played another British monarch in the one-woman stage show “An Evening with Queen Victoria.”
Scales was a versatile stage performer whose theater 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.”
Diane Keaton, the Oscar-winning star known for films including ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘The Godfather,’ has died at 79.
But she remained best known for “Fawlty Towers.” In 2006, Scales was guest of honor 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.
Lawless writes for the Associated Press.
