Prunella Scales is an established star of British situa­ tion comedy, although she has also won praise in a wide range of other productions, including drama for television and stage. Television viewers are most likely to associate her, however. with the classic John Cleese comedy Fawlty Towers, in which she played the un­flappable Sybil to Cleese's appallingly inept hotelier Basil Fawlty.

As Sybil Fawlty, the archetypal gossipy and battle­ hardened nagging wife who in her husband's eyes was more of a hindrance than a help (though in truth she spent much of her time smoothing, with carefully rounded vowels, the ruffled feathers of guests her hus­band had offended), Scales was deemed perfect. Employing all the skills she had acquired from her early experience in repertory theater and subsequently with the Royal Shakespeare Company and other leading troupes, she easily countered the manic ranting of her screen husband, ensuring that life-such as it was­ could carry on at Fawlty Towers. When not seeing to her monstrous coiffure, Sybil took desultory pleasure in providing her husband with new irritations, usually guaranteed to send him into paroxysms of helpless rage. As a mark of the degree to which the perfor­mances of Scales and Cleese were essential to the suc­cess of the series-widely judged  a  classic  of television comedy-an attempt to make a U.S. version under the title Amanda's, with a cast headed by Bea Arthur of Golden Girls fame, was a total failure (even though, in desperation, some episodes were duplicated word for word).

Scales had previously performed as bus conductress Eileen Hughes in Coronation Street and also as costar of the series Marriage Lines, a relatively conventional husband-and-wife situation comedy in which she was paired with Richard Briers. As Kate Starling in the lat­ ter production, she charted the ups and downs experienced by typical newlyweds in the 1960s, wrestling with a range of more or less mundane financial and do­mestic problems (later complicated by the arrival of their baby).

In the wake of the huge success of Fawlty Towers, Scales enjoyed further acclaim from critics and audi­ ences alike in the role of the widowed Sarah in Simon Brett's After Henry, a compassionate and often hilarious comedy that was equally successful as a series for radio and subsequently on television. When not con­ templating the future course of her life as the widowed mother of a teenage daughter, she indulged in enter­ taining sparring with "mother," played by the re­ doubtable Joan Sanderson.

Other highlights of Scales's career have included her performance as Elizabeth Mapp in the television version of E.F. Benson's Edwardian Mapp and Lucia stories, in which she was cast opposite the equally dis­tinguished Geraldine McEwan. Another triumph was her enthralling impersonation of Queen Elizabeth II in a much-acclaimed television version of Alan Bennett's celebrated play A Question of Attribution, which con­cerned the relationship between the monarch and her art adviser Anthony Blunt, who was fated to be exposed as a spy for communist Russia. On the stage, meanwhile. she added another monarch to her list of credits when she impersonated Queen Victoria in her own one-woman show.

Considered one of the most technically proficient actresses of stage and screen of her generation as well as an accomplished occasional director, Scales has continued to divide her time between television and the theater throughout her career, sometimes appearing in partnership with her real-life husband. actor Timo­ thy West. In 1996, in recognition of her skills, she was invited to share some of her secrets concerning acting as part of a short series of master classes on the art of comedy performance.