Prunella Scales obituary

"She did so to the displeasure of the NT's board, which had then lately added Royal to the title of the theatre as the artistic director, Richard Eyre, began his tenure. Eyre stuck to his guns in presenting the play on a double bill, Single Spies, with another Bennett piece, An Englishman Abroad, the stage version of Bennett's TV play based on the friendship struck up between the actor Coral Browne (also played by Scales) and the spy Guy Burgess in Moscow in 1955."

"Playing HMQ, as Bennett named her in the cast list, Scales, said Michael Billington, captured the monarch's essence and her enigma, and audiences delighted in her subtle, sure-footed fencing with Bennett himself as the art historian Anthony Blunt (also a spy) on the paintings he supervised in her collection. She had views on Titian and Vermeer ... and Poussin, or chicken: One's just had it for lunch, she said. I suppose it's fresh in the mind."

"By then, Scales was justly celebrated as another great figure of the age, Sybil Fawlty, wife of John Cleese's irate hotel manager in the BBC's Fawlty Towers, one of the most popular television sitcoms of the 1970s, written by Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth. As a brilliant comedy technician with a keen eye for class differences, Scales at first surprised, then pleased, Cleese, with her suggestion of presenting Sybil as coming from a notch or two below Basil, socially; much of the comedy then arose from a sort of tragic stalemate in their marriage."

Prunella Scales played Queen Elizabeth II at the National Theatre in 1988 in Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, provoking displeasure from the theatre board after the venue had added 'Royal' during Richard Eyre's appointment as artistic director. Eyre presented the play on a double bill, Single Spies, alongside An Englishman Abroad, in which Scales also played Coral Browne. Critics praised Scales for capturing the monarch's essence and for her nuanced exchanges with Bennett's portrayal of art historian Anthony Blunt. Scales previously gained fame as Sybil Fawlty in the BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers and shaped Sybil's social positioning relative to Basil.

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