| Biography | Prunella Scales, CBE (born Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth, 22 June 1932) is an English actress best known for her role as Basil Fawlty's wife Sybil in the British comedy Fawlty Towers and her BAFTA award-nominated role as Queen Elizabeth II in A Question of Attribution (Screen One, BBC 1991) by Alan Bennett.
Throughout her long career, Scales has often been cast in comic roles. Her early work included the second UK adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1952), Hobson's Choice (1954) and Room at the Top (1959).
Her career break came with the early 1960s sitcom Marriage Lines starring opposite Richard Briers. In addition to Fawlty Towers, she has had roles in BBC Radio 4 sitcoms, notably After Henry, Smelling of Roses and Ladies of Letters; on television she starred in the London Weekend Television/Channel 4 series Mapp & Lucia based on the novels by E. F. Benson. She played Queen Elizabeth II in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution. In 1973, Scales teamed with Ronnie Barker in the (original) one-off Meat, which aired as One Man's Meat as part of a series called Seven of One, also for the BBC. Her film appearances also include The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), Stiff Upper Lips (1997), Howards End (1992), and BBC Theatre Night in Joe Orton's farce What the Butler Saw (1987) playing Mrs Prentice, where the cast included husband Timothy West with Dinsdale Landen and Tessa Peake-Jones, as well as a cameo in The Boys From Brazil (1978).
In 2003, she appeared as Hilda, "she who must be obeyed", wife of Horace Rumpole in four BBC Radio 4 plays, with Timothy West, her real-life husband playing her fictional husband. Prunella Scales and Timothy West 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 2003, she went to the opera and 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. Scales part in the melodrama is tiny but delightful. She neither sang nor spoke; she merely cawed. The rarely staged opera was performed in English for the Peter Moores Foundation series of opera in English, recorded by Chandos Records Ltd., and released on a 2-disc set of CDs under the catalog number CHAN 3097(2). Numerous fine vocal soloists and the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir joined Scales and the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of maestro David Parry in a romp of this work of which only the overture ever appears in the concert house, the rest of the opera being largely neglected.
In 2006, she appeared alongside Academy Award winners Vanessa Redgrave and Maximilian Schell in the mini-series The Shell Seekers.
On 16 November 2007, 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 by the Wireless Theatre Company, and available to download free of charge on their website. She appeared in a production of Carrie's War, the Nina Bawden novel, at the Apollo Theatre in 2009.
Scales is an ambassador of SOS Children's Villages, an international orphan charity providing homes and mothers for orphaned and abandoned children. She supports the charity's annual World Orphan Week campaign, which takes place each February.
Prunella is married to Timothy West, and has two sons; the elder is actor and director Samuel West. She also has a stepdaughter, Juliet. |