The Japan Times - UK actress Prunella Scales, TV's Sybil Fawlty, dies at 93

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 were 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 a 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, totalling 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 offence.

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.

T.Ueda--JT