‘I held her hand and read her poetry’: Julian Machin on his 40-year friendship with Prunella Scales

She was 91 and suffering from dementia, but writer Julian Machin didn’t doubt she wouldn’t be able to deliver the lines for what would be her last ever role. Following the death of the revered British actor, he describes the last precious moments they spent together and pays tribute to the formidable woman she was

Prunella Scales was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013 (Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstock)

At our first encounter, in 1979, she put on a dramatic display that I couldn’t forget. Pru was famous and she and her actor husband, Timothy West, were visiting Finchcocks, the famous musical museum of historic keyboard instruments, where I held a summer job. They were queuing for tea in the cellar-restaurant and Pru was smoking. The tea lady asked her to put out her cigarette. Pru removed it from her mouth as though it was indeed offensive, tossed it onto the stone floor, and ground it to extinction with the weight of her long black boot.

Quite a lot of people over the years had cause to be nervous in Pru’s presence. That was the price of her fame, which sat uneasily with her and caused her to live much of her life beneath her Cancerian carapace. You had to stand up to Pru or risk being reduced to that crushed and lifeless cigarette stub on the floor of the tearoom.

In September of the year we first met, aged 17, I then worked as her stage manager on two performances – the first of almost 400 over the next 28 years – of her one-woman show An Evening with Queen Victoria. During that time, we never had an awkward moment. Not everyone can say that of her acquaintance, but it was the beginning of a friendship that endured for more than 40 years.

Pru, who had long reached national treasure status for her role as the indomitable Sybil Fawlty opposite John Cleese in Fawlty Towers, was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013. Before the formal diagnosis, her husband Tim had noticed early signs of cognitive changes as early as 2001, when, during a stage performance in 2001, he observed that something was “not quite right”.

But she never stopped working, and just two years ago, I came up with an idea for what would be her last ever performance.

In November 2022, at a lunch for Katrina (Hendrey), who wrote “Vicky” – as Pru’s famous play came to be known – I noticed from my place next to Tim, across the table, that Pru’s condition was too much for one guest to cope with. I intervened and went to stand behind her. She looked up, and her right hand reached to take a tendril hold of mine, like wisteria searching for a haven.

Something made me say, “Pru, you’re very good at queens, aren’t you?” “Oh yes,” she said, “I am.” When I returned to sit with Tim, I suddenly had an idea: “Would you let Pru read, and me record, the part of 81-year-old Queen Victoria, and we can have other actors play young and middle-aged Victorias, so the play can be revived in an adapted version?”

So, in February 2023, that’s what we did.

Julian Machin with Prunella Scales at her home in South London (Isaac Biglioli)

Pru was 91, and although I never doubted that she could do it – it had been such a part of her life – nobody expected her to record it so movingly.

When I turned up at the house, Tim told me that I was to direct her – “You know the play so well, and I’ll be next door, reading.” I was glad he hadn’t told me in advance. In fact, he was really nervous about Pru doing it. In the end, it took two days, with a lot of holding her hand in mine. I was rather tentative on day one, but by day two, I was tougher on her, realising that is what she needed. In the final scene, Victoria audibly dies, and Pru did it with such audio verisimilitude that it frightened me.

In his book, Pru and Me, a Love Story, Tim wrote: “The recording, which took place at our home, lasted slightly longer than it might have done 20 years ago, but she did a marvellous job. In order not to distract her, I waited in the next room and listened with the door slightly ajar. I shudder to think how many times I have heard Pru reading from a script over the years, and hearing her do so again after what must have been several years was a real tonic.”

“Did I do alright?” [she asked me afterwards.]

“You were wonderful, Pru.”

‘“Can we do it again?” she asked… “It’s been just like old times. See, I can still do it.”

Preparing for ‘Vicky’: Machin reads with Prunella (Isaac Biglioli)

We renamed the play “Queen”, trying to make it user-friendly (there was always a chance that someone would stumble in, thinking it was a tribute to Freddie Mercury). We took it to the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe and four shows at the Tabard Studio Theatre in Chiswick. Pru was in the audience and although she’d agreed beforehand, she declined to take her bow, and like a heckler from the front row, protested, “No, it’s their stage!” But she posed playfully for press photos later, when the audience had gone. Going home in the taxi, she was asked how she’d found it. “It was magic,” she said. The four- and five-star reviews became the enduring tribute that Tim had wanted for her.

Until last October, Pru was able to pull off the odd newspaper interview, with help. We saw Andrew Billen from The Times together. She wasn’t interested in being herded into convention, was bored by some of his very reasonable questions about Fawlty Towers. To an inquiry about whether she argued with Tim, she told him it was as pointless as if one were to debate Andrew’s own arguments with his own wife. When she grew tired, I took Andrew into another room to tell him stuff he still needed to know. We returned to say goodbye and found sweet Pru again, playing with the zips of my rucksack.

I do not doubt that dementia brought out what had always been in Pru – a true gentleness, which she reserved for people she liked and whom she felt unthreatened by. Tania, Tim’s long-term assistant, hardly saw any other side to her. I, however, had witnessed Pru with her mother, the redoubtable Mrs Illingworth, whose wheelchair I had pushed back in 1979, and the experience had informed me how to be towards Pru. Very intimidated by her mother, who had been a low-grade repertory theatre actor, her influence cast a shadow across Pru’s life.

While she had lived with dementia for over a decade, the big change in Pru, unsurprisingly, came after her husband Tim died last year. In January, I wrote in my journal: “Went to see Pru and found her energy reduced since September. She didn’t want to talk, but let me hold her hand in both of mine to give her energy. She was so affectionate and there’s clearly a connection to maintain. I owe it to Tim…”

I kept visiting Pru and in February, I read her poems by John Betjeman as I remembered that she used to read them to him. She told me that she loved Betjeman and that he was a sweet man, but she accorded my renditions with no enthusiasm whatsoever, just silence. It seemed like the worst audition ever. I sloped away. But later, I was told that she’d read aloud every day after that, including to her carers.

Pru onstage at the Tabard last year with Grace Darling (left) and Sara Crowe (Alison Duguid)

In March, I returned. She received me with a wide smile. I’d briefly scanned the books in her library downstairs – orderly volumes of plays on shelves sagging with 50 years of usage living in one house. I didn’t want to risk reading her Shakespeare, but in my bag, I had A Meeting by the River and Giovanni’s Room – two beautiful novels by two great homosexual writers, one whom I think she’d known, and read them to her and her carer. I was slightly in awe of what I was doing for an actor of her standing, but I enjoyed honouring the sweet and humane connection that the novels yielded.

In late April, I read to her again. This time, a biography. At one point, she raised herself up and I couldn’t think where she was heading. “She wants to hug you,” said Catherine, her carer. “I’m happy,” Pru then told me, “This is a good news day.” “That’s what we need,” I replied.

On 28 September, at Kings Place, London, Michael Dussek and Deborah Findlay performed Queen in a one-off words-and-music tribute to Tim. Denise Silvey directed it. But Pru had a cold and couldn’t come. On 16 October, she wasn’t quite up to my planned visit to read to her either. I never saw her again.

Here, then, is my goodbye, Pru:

Because of you and Tim, I found lovely work in the theatre, and through your excellence, I found Denise Silvey to offer Queen to the world in perpetuity. Because of what you did, aged 91, despite your vascular dementia, I know how to make time count, before it runs away and melts behind me.

Above all, Pru, I will always remember you with a smile. That’s the most anyone should hope for after a human life is ended.