'Dementia brought out what had always been in Pru – a true gentleness'

At 91 and living with dementia, Prunella Scales still delivered her final lines flawlessly. Writer Julian Machin recalls their last moments and pays tribute to the actor's formidable spirit

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At our first encounter, in 1979, she put on a dramatic display that I couldn’t forget. Pru was famous and she and her actor husband, Timothy West, were visiting Finchcocks, the famous musical museum of historic keyboard instruments, where I held a summer job. They were queuing for tea in the cellar-restaurant and Pru was smoking. The tea lady asked her to put out her cigarette. Pru removed it from her mouth as though it was indeed offensive, tossed it onto the stone floor, and ground it to extinction with the weight of her long black boot.

Quite a lot of people over the years had cause to be nervous in Pru’s presence. That was the price of her fame, which sat uneasily with her and caused her to live much of her life beneath her Cancerian carapace. You had to stand up to Pru or risk being reduced to that crushed and lifeless cigarette stub on the floor of the tearoom.

In September of the year we first met, aged 17, I then worked as her stage manager on two performances - the first of almost 400 over the next 28 years - of her one-woman show An Evening with Queen Victoria. During that time, we never had an awkward moment. Not everyone can say that of her acquaintance, but it was the beginning of a friendship that endured for more than 40 years.

Pru, who had long reached national treasure status for her role as the indomitable Sybil Fawlty opposite John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013. Before the formal diagnosis, her husband Tim had noticed early signs of cognitive changes as early as 2001, when, during a stage performance in 2001, he observed that something was “not quite right”.

But she never stopped working, and just two years ago, I came up with an idea for what would be her last ever performance.