British actress Prunella Scales, best known internationally for her role as the sharp-tongued Sybil Fawlty in the classic sitcom Fawlty Towers, has died at the age of 93, her family announced on Tuesday. Scales, whose career spanned nearly seven decades across stage and screen, passed away peacefully at her home in London on Monday, her sons said.
Actress Prunella Scales, best known for her role as the long-suffering Sybil in the British TV comedy classic Fawlty Towers, has died aged 93, her family said Tuesday.
The actress died "peacefully at home in London" on Monday, her sons Samuel and Joseph said.
"She was watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died," they said in a statement on X, adding that her last days were "comfortable, contented, and surrounded by love."
Scales was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013 but continued to work for several years, including with her husband, the popular screen and stage actor Timothy West.
The couple was married for 61 years, and West, who died in November 2024 aged 90, was to become her carer. But they also found time to film several series of the Channel 4 show Great Canal Journeys.
But it was in the Bafta-winning Fawlty Towers as Sybil, the acerbic foil to her snobbish, accident-prone hotelier husband, Basil Fawlty, played by John Cleese, that Scales engraved her place in UK hearts.
The original show, written by Cleese, the Monty Python star, and his then-wife Connie Booth, ran on BBC television for two series in 1975 and 1979, totaling only 12 episodes.
Set in a hotel in the southern seaside resort of Torquay, it became so beloved that whole lines can be spouted by Brits at random, usually provoking fits of laughter.
In 2019, the show was named the greatest British sitcom ever by a panel of TV experts for "Radio Times" magazine.
The following year, however, one episode in which Basil Fawlty does a goosestepping impersonation of Adolf Hitler was taken down by the BBC for fear of creating offense.
Among her many acting credits over nearly 70 years, Scales also played Queen Elizabeth II in the British film A Question Of Attribution as well as appearing in a one-woman show called An Evening With Queen Victoria.
She is survived by two sons and a stepdaughter, as well as seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
With AFP
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