Prunella Scales, actress best known for playing the acid-tongued Sybil in Fawlty Towers – obituary

Perhaps her most memorable radio role was as Sarah, a newly widowed housewife, in Simon Brett’s highly praised and poignant comedy about bereavement, After Henry (1987), which later translated to the television screen.

She was born Prunella Margaret Rumney Illingworth on June 22 1932 in Sutton Abinger, Surrey. Her father was a Yorkshire-born cotton salesman; her mother, Catherine Scales, the daughter of a Bradford merchant, was briefly an actress. She disliked the name Prunella, considering it affected, but her mother had been in a play called Prunella, or Love in a Dutch Garden at Harrogate, and promised herself that she would bestow the name on any future daughter.

Her eccentric upbringing, in an unheated, rented farmhouse, where she would have to crack the ice in the wash-basin on winter mornings, inured her against most minor deprivations; in later life she remained guilty about having central heating.

Educated on a scholarship at Moira House School, Eastbourne, Prunella trained for the stage at the Old Vic Theatre School and studied method acting with Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio in New York, while taking a tiny part in Tyrone Guthrie’s Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker.