Actor who breathed fire and laughter into 'dragon' Sybil

Immortalised by her role as the long-suffering Sybil Fawlty, Prunella Scales also starred in 'Mapp & Lucia' and 'After Henry', and played Queen Victoria on stage and screen

- ANTHONY HAYWARD

The role of Sybil, the wife of the manic hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty in the 1970s BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers, brought Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, her greatest fame.

She gave the domineering character - regarded by her husband, played by John Cleese, as a fire-breathing dragon, constantly thwarting his snobbish attempts to take their establishment upmarket and eradicate the “riffraff” - a quality that the programme’s writers, Cleese and his real-life wife, Connie Booth (who played the maid, Polly), had not foreseen when the first series was made in 1975.

“It was my idea that she was a cut below [Basil] socially - not very well educated, but very careful about her speech,” explained Scales. “What she had fallen for was Basil’s poshness, and he had fallen for her because she was attractive, in a blowsy kind of way.”

Sybil, complete with a laugh that her husband described as sounding like “someone machine-gunning a seal”, had the upper hand and was always one step ahead of Basil, who was rude to guests and often teetered on the edge of insanity in his frustration.

While Basil was digging himself further into another disaster, she could often be heard on the telephone, engaged in a private conversation. “I know... I know... I know,” almost became a catchphrase. But it was never long before she would enter the fray.