Prunella Scales

Actor who made audiences laugh as Sybil Fawlty and moved them to tears navigating canals with her husband

- Patrick Kidd

When Prunella Scales auditioned for the part of the sharp-tongued wife of a snobbish provincial hotelier, her would-be screen husband was in bed with the flu. Scales had never previously met John Cleese, who also co-wrote Fawlty Towers, and after she praised the script he asked if she had any questions. "Yes, why did they get married?" she asked. Cleese sighed. "Oh my God," he replied. "I was afraid you would ask that.

It had been troubling him: what had brought together the chaotic Basil - rude to those he thought inferior, ingratiating to those he wanted to impress - with the shrewish Sybil, “my little nest of vipers", who laughed like "someone machine-gunning a seal"?

Fortunately, Scales had already invented the character's back story and it won her the part. Sybil's parents were lower middle-class owners of a boarding house and she had fallen for Basil because he appeared posh. Her disappointment that he was not, coupled with his frustration that she was much more competent at hotel management made for ripe comedy. "I didn't think Sybil was a dragon," Scales said. "I thought she was a saint."

While a toxic screen marriage made her famous, Scales had a very happy 61-year union with the actor Timothy West that captivated new audiences late in life over 10 series of Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4 from 2014-19. Travelling by narrowboat was a hobby they had enjoyed since the 1970s and viewers found their pottering along the blue veins of green England (and, in later series, overseas) to be charming.