Prunella Scales: From Fawlty Towers to Great Canal Journeys

Prunella Scales, who died at the age of 93, was one of Britain's finest comic actors.

But despite a long and distinguished career on stage and screen, she will inevitably be remembered as Sybil Fawlty in the 1970s TV comedy, Fawlty Towers.

It was Sybil's mission in life to keep tabs on her "stick insect" husband Basil - played by John Cleese - between cigarette-fuelled phone conversations with her friend, Audrey.

It fell to her to placate guests who had been shouted at, totally ignored or, in some cases, throttled by Basil when in one of his more manic moods.

Her nightmarish laugh, gravity-defying hairdo and ferocious temper were part of a carefully constructed character that ranks as a comic masterpiece.

And while many actors would have distanced themselves from too close an association with a single role, Scales always expressed her delight in having been part of the Fawlty Towers experience.

Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth was born near Guildford on 22 June 1932.

It was a family deeply in love with the theatre - with her mother, Bim Scales, a former actor who'd given it all up for marriage and children.

Bright and bookish, after wartime evacuation to the Lake District, Prunella attended Moira House Girls School in Eastbourne.

In 1949, she won a scholarship to the Old Vic Theatre School in London. Two years later, she secured a position as an assistant stage manager at Bristol Old Vic.

This was to the fury of her former headmistress in Eastbourne, who had hoped she would apply to Cambridge and wrote to the theatre to tell them so.

At drama school, Scales had been thought of as a junior character actor rather than an obvious Juliet.

"We all wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn," she later told her biographer, "but I wasn't attractive and nobody fancied me."

Only 12 episodes were ever made.

The first series, which aired in 1975, failed to win huge audiences but, as it continued, its hilarious mix of absurd pratfalls and embarrassing situations grew in popularity.

Scales thought hard about how to play Sybil Fawlty, and decided that her social background had to be inferior to her husband Basil's.

At first, John Cleese and his wife and fellow writer Connie Booth were unsure about the treatment.

"Once they heard the first reading in rehearsal," recalled Scales, "they were sold on the idea."

Later in her career, she was, all too often, called upon to play "dragons" and "old bags" when she hankered after more glamorous roles.

But when asked what she thought was the high point of her career, Scales had no hesitation in picking Sybil Fawlty.

"It was a tough job," she insisted, "but I'm still proud of it." She even thought it helped get the paying public into theatres.

"I like to think that if the public have seen you in one thing they'll come and see you in another," she said.

In 1995, she began starring as Dotty Turnbull in a series of TV adverts for supermarket giant Tesco - which paid her partly in vouchers.

The campaign, which ran for nine years, was cited as the biggest factor in propelling it to market leadership in the mid 1990s.

Scales later came in for some gentle criticism for taking part in the Tesco adverts, when she backed a campaign to stop local shops closing in her area of London.

One of her finest performances came in Breaking the Code, the film about the Bletchley Park wartime codebreakers.

She appears as Alan Turing's mother, who embodies a society that treated homosexual acts as a crime, an attitude that eventually led to his death.

Away from acting, Scales was a committed campaigner.

She served as president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and she was a lifelong Labour Party supporter, who counted Neil Kinnock as a "dear friend".