Prunella Scales will forever be known as the long-suffering wife of Basil Fawlty

Prunella Scales was one of the most successful and popular comedy actresses of her generation – achieving worldwide fame and recognition as Sybil, the long-suffering wife of Basil Fawlty in the memorable TV series Fawlty Towers.

But although she was regularly cast in comic roles, her abilities ranged far more widely than that – she even appeared in opera.

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.

But she will be remembered most of all for her role in “partnership” with John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, often regarded as the most hilarious comedy series ever shown on television.

Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth was born on June 22, 1932 and attended Moira House Girls’ School in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Her early work, during a long career, included parts in the second UK adaptation of Pride And Prejudice (1952) and Hobson’s Choice (1954).

Her career break came with the early 1960s sitcom Marriage Lines starring opposite Richard Briers. She also had roles in BBC Radio 4 sitcoms, notably After Henry, Smelling Of Roses and Ladies Of Letters, while on television she starred in the London Weekend/Channel 4 series Mapp & Lucia based on the novels by EF Benson.

She played Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution. And in 1973, Scales teamed up with Ronnie Barker in the series called Seven Of One, also for the BBC.

After several film appearances, in 2003 Scales appeared as Hilda, the “she who must be obeyed”, wife of Horace Rumpole in four BBC Radio 4 plays, with her real-life husband, Timothy West, playing her fictional husband.

Scales and West subsequently toured Australia at the same time in different productions.

Scales appeared in a one-woman show called An Evening With Queen Victoria, which also featured the tenor Ian Partridge singing songs written by Prince Albert.

Also in that year, she voiced the role of Magpie, the eponymous thief in a recording of Gioachino Rossini’s opera semi-seria in two acts, La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) in which a servant girl is condemned to death for the theft of a silver spoon snatched by a magpie presumably decorating its nest to lure a mate. Her part in the melodrama was tiny but memorable: she neither sang nor spoke; but merely cawed.

In 2006, she appeared alongside Academy Award winners Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell in the mini-series The Shell Seekers.

The following year, Scales appeared in Children in Need, reprising her role as Sybil Fawlty, the new manager who wants to take over Hotel Babylon. She appeared in the audio play The Youth of Old Age, produced in 2008 and also in a production of Carrie’s War, the Nina Bawden novel, at the Apollo Theatre in 2009.

Scales was a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party and appeared on their party political broadcasts during the 2005 and 2010 general election campaigns. She was an ambassador of SOS Children’s Villages, an international charity providing homes and mothers for orphaned and abandoned children.

Scales married West in 1963, and had two sons; the elder being the actor and director Samuel West, and a stepdaughter, Juliet.

In January 2013, she revealed her short term memory was fading. A year later her husband confirmed that Scales was living with dementia.

West spoke openly about his wife’s illness and told Piers Morgan’s Life Stories: “The sad thing is that you just watch the gradual disappearance of the person that you knew and loved and were very close to.

“When we’ve been to a concert, or a play, or a film, there’s nothing very much we can say about it afterwards because Pru will have a fairly hazy memory.”

The couple appeared together in 10 series of Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4 from 2014 until Scales’ dementia reportedly progressed to the point where they had to stop in 2020.

Their last journey for the programme was broadcast in June 2019. It was along the South East Asian waterways on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where they also took in the Cambodian temple of Angkor Wat.

There was several more specials where they looked back at their travels, which were broadcast in 2020.

Actress Dame Sheila Hancock and her friend, presenter Gyles Brandreth, then took over Great Canal Journeys.

West died in November last year at the age of 90.