“Our darling mother Prunella Scales died peacefully at home in London yesterday,” the sons’ statement reads. “She was 93. Although dementia forced her retirement from a remarkable acting career of nearly 70 years, she continued to live at home. She was watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died. Pru was married to Timothy West for 61 years. He died in November 2024. She is survived by two sons and one stepdaughter, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. We would like to thank all those who gave Pru such wonderful care at the end of her life: her last days were comfortable, contented and surrounded by love.”
Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth (who used the maiden name of her mother, also a professional actor, for her stage name) was born in Surrey, England, in 1932. Per The Times, she won a scholarship to the Old Vic drama school in London in 1949, after which she worked as an assistant stage manager at the Bristol Old Vic. She went on to have a long and prolific career on both stage and screen, notably playing Lydia Bennet in the 1952 BBC Pride And Prejudice miniseries and starring opposite Charles Laughton (Hobson’s Choice) and Peter Sellers (Waltz Of The Toreadors). She earned a BAFTA nomination for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett’s 1991 televised play, A Question Of Attribution. In later years, she hosted the Channel 4 travel series Great Canal Journeys with her husband, Timothy West.
Scales’ breakthrough role was the 1963 BBC sitcom Marriage Lines, but her most famous role came years later on Fawlty Towers. Airing just two six-episode seasons in 1975 and 1979, the series was nevertheless voted the number one British television program of all time by the British Film Institute. Monty Python’s John Cleese created and starred in the series as Basil Fawlty, a hapless hotel proprietor. Scales appeared opposite as “Cleese’s practical, bossy, savagely controlling wife,” as Tasha Robinson described her for The A.V. Club in 2002. “To some degree, the show succeeds because it’s grounded in simple but highly effective British-comedy stereotypes: Scales and Cleese are perfect foils, as, respectively, the idealized face of polite reserve and an anthropomorphic version of the seething, impotent fury that such reserve can hide,” Robinson wrote.
In a statement (via the BBC), Cleese described Scales as “a really wonderful comic actress,” adding, “Scene after scene she was absolutely perfect.”
