Did John Cleese and Prunella Scales get on in real life? Inside Fawlty Towers friendship
Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93, is best known for playing Sybil Fawlty in beloved British sitcom Fawlty Towers opposite her fictional husband John Cleese, who played Basil Scales
Beloved British actress Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93 after a decade-long battle with dementia, will always be remembered as Sybil Fawlty opposite John Cleese's quick-tempered Basil in Fawlty Towers.
Their on-screen marriage may have been chaotic, but off-screen the pair had a deep professional respect for each other and a friendship that lasted decades.
Prunella has since become renowned for her portrayal of Sybil, but when the role first landed on her doorstep in 1975, she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
In a piece he wrote for The Daily Mail in 2023, her husband, the late Timothy West, recalled that when she first read the Fawlty Towers scripts, she was uncertain about the project.
“I don’t really know what to make of this thing,” she told him. “It's a sitcom set in a hotel in Torquay. They want me to play the wife of the owner – she’s called Sybil Fawlty.”
After meeting John, who was famous for being one of Monty Python's co-founders at the time, Prunella was persuaded by his enthusiasm for the series.
She even came up with an entire backstory for Sybil, deciding she would be the daughter of a pub family from the South Coast who fell for Basil's posh charm and soon realised she'd married an upper-class fool.
John loved her idea, and that character detail helped shape the entire tone of the show. Although Fawlty Towers was intense to film, Scales and Cleese's working relationship survived the shoot thanks to their mutual admiration for each other.
“John has an enormous amount of energy and can be quite frightening at times,” Scales once told Timothy, “like working with a live machine gun – you just have to keep it pointing away from you.”
But the two developed a natural rhythm that became comedy gold. For his part, John credited Prunella with defining Sybil far better than he and his Fawlty Towers co-writer Connie Booth had imagined.
“We'd written her differently from how Pru played her,” John later said. “But by the end of the second day, we realised her version worked better than ours. Pru did it for us.”
It was clear that Prunella and Timothy were still closely in touch with John towards the end of their lives, as Prunella's late husband discussed their shared thoughts on John's decision to work on a modern version of Fawlty Towers during an interview with Saga in 2023.
He told the publication: “We are both interested that he feels it’s something you could make again. But it isn’t going to be the same. It's not going to have Pru or Andrew Sachs [the couple's close friend who played waiter Manuel and died of vascular dementia in 2016] in it.
“I think if it had been me, I'd have said: 'You've done it. It was perfect, people loved it. What else are you going to do?' If that's what John wants to do, fair enough. We are very fond of John and think he's brilliant. But will we watch it? I don't know.”
Sadly, Prunella was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2014. Timothy spoke about what it was like living with her as she started to lose her memory, admitting he felt he was witnessing the “gradual disappearance” of the person he knew and loved.
Despite the difficulties Prunella's fading memory posed to their relationship, the couple stayed married for 61 years until Timothy's death in 2024, and he said that getting to spend more time with her after the end of her career brought him a lot of joy.
Although she forgot many things towards the end of her life, Fawlty Towers always stayed close to Prunella's heart, and according to the actress's sons, she was even watching the sitcom the day before she died.
In a statement Samuel and Joseph West made to the PA News Agency, they said: “Our darling mother Prunella Scales died peacefully at home in London yesterday.
“She was 93. Although dementia forced her retirement from a remarkable acting career of nearly 70 years, she continued to live at home. She was watching Fawlty Towers the day before she died.
“We would like to thank all those who gave Pru such wonderful care at the end of her life: her last days were comfortable, contented and surrounded by love.”
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