Versatile stage and screen actor who found TV comedy fame as Sybil Fawlty and later played Elizabeth II on stage
Although it became virtually a weekly occurrence to find Queen Elizabeth II treading the boards in recent years, the first time a reigning monarch was portrayed on the contemporary British stage came when Prunella Scales, who has died aged 93, played Her Majesty in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution at the National Theatre in 1988.
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 English 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.”
