British comic actress Prunella Scales (Fawlty Towers), 93, died on Oct. 27. She got her first break in the 1960s sitcom The Marriage Lines, and her most famous role, as John Cleese’s bossy wife Sybil on Fawlty Towers (which only ran 12 episodes, but became a cult favorite in reruns). Scales went on to costar in such series as Mapp & Lucia (as Elizabeth Mapp), After Henry, Searching, and The Big Knights, and in such movies as Escape from the Dark, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Boys from Brazil, The Wicked Lady, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Consuming Passions, A Chorus of Disapproval, Howards End, Wolf, An Awfully Big Adventure, and Stiff Upper Lips. She was also the face of the supermarket Tesco ads, with AbFab’s Jane Horrocks playing her daughter. She was married to actor Timothy West (who died in 2024); one of their sons is actor Samuel West. “The joy of being an actor is to deliver good writing to people,” Scales once said, adding, “The agony of doing Shakespeare is that you can't ask him what he meant.”
