Prunella Scales on her marriage to Timothy West, Fawlty Towers and why TV sitcoms were her "least favourite form of work"

This interview was originally published in January 1995 to promote BBC Two series Signs and Wonders.

She appears apprehensive as she walks into the River Restaurant at the Savoy Hotel. There is not a hint of the regal hauteur or shrewish snobbery she brought to her two most well-known roles - the Queen in Alan Bennett's Single Spies, and Sybil, which still resonates 20 years after Fawlty Towers. There is no reason why there should be. She has played innumerable characters (in the four-part thriller Signs and Wonders she is the anguished mother of a girl who is seduced by a mind-bending cult) and is one of Britain's most versatile and best-loved actresses.

"Being a character actress means you're not very pretty really," she says softly, smiling. She and her husband, actor Timothy West, envy their 28-year-old son Sam, also a successful actor, because, she adds, "he'll never lose a part through not looking good enough, which has happened to both of us. A blow to the ego? Yes, but you tend to think, 'Here we go again.' There's a wonderful line by Thornton Wilder: a 12-year-old girl is rubbing her cheeks to make them look attractively pink and her mother tells her, 'Stop that. You're quite pretty enough for all normal purposes.' I think I'm quite pretty enough for all normal purposes."

As she sips champagne, she seems ill at ease and asks, "Does this make everyone terribly indiscreet by the time pudding arrives?" I hope so, I reply. She is introspective and shy, but given to bursts of good humour which light up her whole face. "I'm terrified of everyone. Well, a bit," she insists. "Most actors I know are deeply unsure of themselves. Vulnerability is more important to us than confidence."

Surely not, when she's had a career as successful as hers? "Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish," she says quickly, raising her voice. "We're slaves to opportunity. It's very much a matter of luck. Tim and I are extraordinarily lucky, but there have been many disappointments - shows failing, not getting parts, being very short of money and out of work."

They come from thespian backgrounds. Tim's parents were both actors, and so was her mother, but she "retired" when she married - "she had very strong ideas about children and all that." Her father was a cotton salesman, "a sweet man," who didn't mind his only daughter being called Prunella after a play of that name her mother was performing in Harrogate when she was 17 - and fell in love with the leading man. They seem to have been eccentric in the most gentle, British way, living in a rented farmhouse in Surrey without running water or electricity.

Imbued with a puritan work ethic - or maybe it's just good taste - she thinks watching breakfast TV is the epitome of sin and feels guilty reading a book before lunch. Her crocheting is a constant companion to while away idle moments and, although she served on the council of Equity, the actors' union, for two years, she says, "I soft-pedal my politics. It's rather brave for actors to express opinions in public, almost a professional hazard. If people think I'm a raving pinko it might mitigate any effect I could have on a cause. There is this pernicious word which can completely negate any opinion."

She pauses before building to a modest crescendo of indignation: "'Luvvie'. It is a word never, ever heard within the profession. It is an iniquitous invention of the press, a hysterical term used to devalue something which is true and they are thus afraid of. One worries when one reads it in the Guardian because they are supposed to be on my side. 'Luvvies'," she announces with passion, "do not exist."

Let's talk about the Queen, I suggest. She gazes across the Thames to the monolithic concrete brutalism that is the Royal National Theatre. "It was such a joy playing her there," she recalls. "It was the first time a reigning monarch had been portrayed on the stage and when I came on - I had a very good wig and costume - there was a frisson which was absolutely physical. It wasn't, 'My God, that woman looks so much like the Queen.' It was, 'How cheeky.' It was very strong blasphemy, and good news.

"I had a sweet letter from her private detective or someone who said he had to stop himself from standing up. That was the most wonderful, lovely compliment. I didn't enjoy doing it on television at all. It was bliss to be allowed to have a corgi, even though she was a frightful 'star' - it would have been too expensive to have one on stage - but because the Queen is often seen on television it wasn't a first, and it became perfectly obvious in close-up that this wasn't HMQ herself. It was P Scales in a wig, and that's not so much fun. I was very disappointed in myself. Maybe that's actors' paranoia or, as Tim says, 'galloping sensitivity'."

It was sensitivity that persuaded her to have bags removed from under her eyes in 1978. "They're still quite bad, but not so bad as they would be. It was an excellent idea and not terribly expensive. It's not so much that you look better; it avoids the audience being distracted by thoughts of, 'Goodness, how old is this woman?'"

For the same reason, although she is open about her age, she doesn't really want it mentioned, so I won't, although a dedicated ageist could deduce it by reading on. "I've never lied about my age, but it's irrelevant. I do a one-woman show on Queen Victoria and the day there's a howl of derisive laughter when I play her as a young woman I'll give up. But audiences like to make an imaginative leap, and I don't want them thinking, 'She looks good for her age.' It's the least significant thing about you, don't you think?"

Earlier this year she had a small part in her first Hollywood film, Wolf, with Jack Nicholson. "It was very jolly and I loved it. When I became an actress Hollywood was nothing to do with anything I wanted to do. It was like going to Timbuktu. I thought acting was about trying to be as good as you can in stage plays. I enjoyed radio, and broadcasting is still a great joy to me. The scenery is so much more expansive - you have to imagine it yourself, and there are no limits - and you can do boring jobs like ironing while you listen.

"It's a dreadful thing to say - because I suppose I earn the bulk of my living from them - but TV sitcoms are my least favourite form of work. I don't mind situation comedy in the theatre, where you do it night after night and can learn from the audience. I love long runs because I'm a slow worker. But on TV it's a horrendous schedule. I never really felt ready to go on Fawlty Towers. Do you think I'm still lumbered with that show? People need a peg to hang you on and I'm grateful to it on the whole. It opened, rather than closed, doors for me. I enjoyed After Henry enormously and was quite proud of it."

"Usually I absolutely hate watching myself, but have an irresistible urge to fast-forward to my next bit to see if I was OK. That's vanity, of course. Perhaps it's self-obsession. I challenge anyone to watch themselves with detachment. I find television soporific. It sends me to sleep, even when I'm on, and especially when Tim is. It's a source of great domestic strife. He says I was sitting there one evening with my crocheting watching some performance of his and when it ended I said, 'Jolly good, darling.' But as the next programme started I said, 'Oh, it's darling Peter Barkworth. Where are my glasses?'"

"I hope I'm not competitive - we both desire each other's good - but I was often envious of him when he played leading parts in the theatre, and I think he was envious of me being quite well paid in sitcoms. It's difficult being married to an actor, but it would be absolutely impossible to be married to anyone else. Our most frequent row when young, and both working, was who needed cherishing most. Guess who won?"

"You," I say. She gives a mock imperious glare and screeches, "Nooooooarrrrr. After the children were born [their second son, Joseph, 25, is studying to become a teacher] I was reluctant to work, but Tim kicked me back and I'm grateful. It was quite painful but I think ultimately it made me a better mum. We spent virtually all our money taking them with us wherever we went. I felt it was my duty when we hit a new town to dangle babies at six o'clock on a Sunday evening so the local paper could carry a picture and perhaps entice a few people into the theatre. It's a professional obligation, not something I personally relish, but it's no good acting your knickers off if no one knows what you're doing and where.

"I suspect that publicity does not enhance your professional life in any way. I'm not going to say 'career'. I don't like that word. Acting is a business, a working life."

She married Timothy West in 1963 when she was 30 ("My mother thought I'd be left on the shelf. I didn't") and they have lived in the same house near Wandsworth Common for 26 years. They also own a 60ft narrowboat, on which she relaxes - sometimes causing herself embarrassment.

After one day's mooching on the river she went into a pub for a snack, looking scruffy and a bit butch in trousers and pullover. "There was this awful piped music, so I strode to the bar and said to this very pretty blonde barmaid, 'I say, darling, what about having it off?' She was startled and said, 'What!' I repeated, 'Could we have it off, my love.' After a stunned pause, she said, 'Oh. You mean the music?'"

She'll be living on the boat again next month while she directs Tim in Alan Bennett's Getting On, at the Quarry Theatre in the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. "I haven't directed him since 1982, when we did Uncle Vanya in Perth. It was one of the happiest jobs we've done, contrary to all expectations. I enjoy directing. It makes you a better and more compliant actor because you understand the problems better. Why should anyone be surprised if an actor turns out to be a good director? We work with several of them every year, so we know what doesn't work - to put it no higher than that."

Money seems genuinely to be of secondary importance to her. "I didn't become an actress to get rich. One wants merely to remain solvent. When I was young, waiting for buses, my dream was to afford a cab. Now I can - and that's as rich as I want to be. I don't understand anyone wanting to be famous - all that business of people recognising you in Marks and Spencer with unwashed hair, being perfectly foul to your children. Ugh."

She has cheese to finish her claret, and then looks at her watch. "Golly," she says, "I must totter off," and she exits through the still crowded dining room, nibbling at Brie - radiant, reliable and even a touch regal.

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