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Finito World
Prunella Scales, who died this week aged 92, was that rare kind of actor who could make you laugh with a flick of the eyes, and then break your heart with the same movement just a beat later. She was a perfectionist with a nose for the human detail that makes characters linger in the memory—and perhaps never more so than in her immortal turn as Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers, a role that redefined British television comedy.
It is difficult now to watch Fawlty Towers—still widely considered the finest sitcom ever written—without marvelling at what Scales did with the character of Sybil. In the script, she was the long-suffering wife, exasperated and sarcastic, a woman perhaps defeated by the smallness of her husband’s vision. But Scales gave her something more: the edge of menace, the strange allure of someone who has survived in a mad world by becoming slightly mad herself. She once said that she saw Sybil not as Basil’s oppressor, but as a kind of tragic realist: “She understands that the world is full of idiots, and she’s simply chosen to rise above it.”
John Cleese, who wrote the series with Connie Booth and played Basil, was generous in his praise. “Pru made Sybil twice as funny as she was on the page,” he said in 2020. “She found rhythms, sneers, even silences I hadn’t written—but which she delivered with genius.”
Connie Booth was equally admiring. “There was an intelligence to her performance that elevated the whole show,” she said. “She could suggest an entire marriage with a single eyebrow.”
Born Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth in Sutton Abinger, Surrey in 1932, she trained at the Old Vic Theatre School, and began her career in the theatre, where her wit and timing were already drawing notice. Her stage career never disappeared behind her television work—indeed, she took great pains to ensure that one fed the other. She was a leading light at Chichester, the National and the West End, taking on roles from Shakespeare to Coward. Her Lady Bracknell was all daggered precision; her Gertrude in *Hamlet* unusually warm and weighted with grief.
There was film too—she played Queen Elizabeth II in A Question of Attribution (1991) with a quiet majesty—and dozens of television roles beyond Fawlty Towers. But it is Sybil who stays with us. That cackling laugh, that clipped sarcasm, that perfect helmet of hair. It was a performance in miniature: all the deeper for being restrained, all the more anarchic for being rooted in something recognisably real.
She did not court the public spotlight, but nor did she shrink from it. In later years, her battle with Alzheimer’s disease became quietly known. She and her husband, the actor Timothy West, were followed and admired as they journeyed Britain’s canals in Great Canal Journeys—a moving coda to a life in the limelight. There was something deeply noble about those episodes: a couple still in love, still sharing laughter, still insisting on the value of discovery.
For actors today, her life is a kind of lesson: that the work matters most, that no role is too small to be deepened with imagination, that comedy at its best is a matter of truth-telling. It is also a lesson in longevity—not just in terms of time, but in resonance. Scales showed us how a character can live far beyond the show that bore her. She is gone, but Sybil—terrifying, hilarious, wholly unforgettable—remains.
Scales is survived by Timothy West and their sons, including actor Samuel West. She will be mourned by audiences who recognised in her an artist of unique poise, precision, and mischief.
As Sybil once put it, eyeing another disaster-in-waiting at Fawlty Towers: “I’m not a complete fool. Some parts are missing.” In Scales’ performance, not a single part ever was.
