Prunella Scales, the British actress best known for her role as Sybil Fawlty, the unflappable foil to her hotheaded husband, Basil, in the sitcom “Fawlty Towers,” died at her home in London on Monday. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed by her sons on social media. The cause was not immediately clear. Ms. Scales had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2014.
“She was watching ‘Fawlty Towers’ the day before she died,” her sons said.
In an almost seven-decade career, Ms. Scales appeared in scores of plays and television series, and gained a reputation for excelling in comedic parts. Her breakout television role was in the BBC sitcom “The Marriage Lines” (1961-66), in which she starred as a newlywed, frustrated homemaker settling into domesticity with her office worker husband (played by Richard Briers).
In “Fawlty Towers,” which aired on BBC Two in 1975 and 1979 and later on PBS, Ms. Scales elevated the character of exasperated spouse to a new level.
Starring opposite John Cleese, who played the high-strung manager of a dysfunctional seaside hotel, Ms. Scales was his elaborately coiffed and impeccably dressed wife who stood as a picture of eye-rolling calm as farce unfolded around her.
She was often found smoking in a back room while on the telephone with a friend, her gossiping frequently punctuated with a drawling “Oh, I know!” Confronted with her husband’s shenanigans, she cut him down to size with a withering look or a short, sharp “BASIL!” — no mean feat for the petite 5-foot-3 Ms. Scales facing the 6-foot-5 Mr. Cleese.
Some of Basil’s favorite epithets for his wife included “my little piranha fish” and “my little nest of vipers,” and he likened her braying laugh to “someone machine-gunning a seal.” She often responded in kind: “Do you really imagine, even in your wildest dreams, that a girl like this could possibly be interested in an aging, brilliantined stick insect like you?” she admonished when she caught him in the closet of an attractive guest’s room.
Although the show ran for only two seasons, and in later years drew criticism for the use of racial slurs in one episode, the popularity of “Fawlty Towers” endured. It was named No. 1 in a list of the top 100 British television shows by the British Film Institute in 2000 and the best British sitcom of all time by Radio Times.
Ms. Scales was married to Timothy West, a theater actor and a fellow staple of British television. In 2014, the same year as Ms. Scales’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, the couple indulged in a shared passion for narrowboats (or canal boats), appearing in “Great Canal Journeys,” in which they toured the waterways of Britain, Europe and farther afield.
The show struck a chord, with Mr. West gently warning viewers at the start of each episode of his wife’s condition. The Guardian newspaper said that the bittersweet series “charted the long, slow goodbye that is living with dementia.”
Ms. Scales’s declining health brought a close to their participation in the show in October 2019 — the end, the Guardian said, to “one of the greatest love stories on TV.”
“I am famous for playing unfortunate wives,” Ms. Scales said in 2013, “but I have been a very lucky wife.”
Prunella Margaret Rumney Scales Illingworth was born on June 22, 1932, in Sutton Abinger, Surrey, southwest of London. Her mother, Catherine (Scales) Illingworth, was a professional actress before marrying John Richardson Illingworth, a cotton salesman.
In 1942, Prunella was sent to Moira House, a boarding school, where she took piano lessons and excelled at speech and drama.
At 17, she was admitted on a two-year scholarship to the Old Vic in London, where she immediately felt out of her depth, a feeling that she attributed to having led a sheltered life. “Although I wanted to be an actress, I was very inhibited and thought it was wrong to show off,” she told Teresa Ransom in a 2005 biography, “Prunella.”
Ms. Scales’ first major London show was in 1955, when she played Ermengarde in the inaugural production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker” at the Haymarket Theater. The show was a hit, running for nine months in the West End before transferring to Broadway. While in New York, Ms. Scales studied acting under Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio.
Returning to England, she joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theater (later the Royal Shakespeare Company), appearing in “the Merchant of Venice,” “Measure for Measure” and Peter Hall’s first production, “Love Labour’s Lost.”
She met Mr. West while filming a BBC historical production, “She Died Young” (1961). They married in 1963.
Ms. Scales is survived by the couple’s two children, Samuel, an actor, and Joseph; a stepdaughter, Juliet, from Mr. West’s first marriage; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Mr. West died last year.
After “Fawlty Towers,” Ms. Scales continued to be a regular presence on British television. From 1985-86 she was Miss Elizabeth Mapp in “Mapp and Lucia,” a series based on novels by E.F. Benson that followed the gossipy middle-aged women of a small town in 1930s England.
Attracting a following in the United States, the show was described as “positively delicious” in a New York Times review: “Mapp, plumpish, round and insinuating, is brought to blazing hypocritical perfection by Prunella Scales”
In 1980, she starred at the Old Vic in “An Evening With Queen Victoria,” a one-woman stage show based on the queen’s diaries and letters. She went on to perform it a reported 400 times in theaters, churches and municipal halls across the country, and in Bermuda, Brunei, the United States and Australia.
In 1988, Ms. Scales won critical acclaim for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in the Alan Bennett play “A Question of Attribution” staged at London’s National Theater and adapted as a BBC film in 1991. “Without ever indulging in caricature,” Frank Rich said in The Times, “the extraordinary Miss Scales makes a completely persuasive queen: shrewd without being intellectual, convivial without being intimate, charming without being warm.”
In the 1990s, she made several films, including “Howards End” (1992) with Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave; “Second Best” (1994) with William Hurt; and “Wolf” (1994) with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer.
In 1992, she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She taught acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and at the Actors Center and also in private workshops, and had steady work on television, stage and radio until her official retirement from acting in 2020.
But it always seemed that interviewers wanted to talk only about “Fawlty Towers.” For her part, Ms. Scales said she would always be grateful to Sybil.
“Most people seem to remember Sybil as this hideous gorgon of a woman,” she told her biographer. But, she said, “I consider her a heroine.”
Claire Moses contributed reporting.
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