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Actress Prunella Scales has reprised her lifelong role as Queen Victoria despite an ongoing battle with dementia.
Performing the role she first stepped into 44 years ago, Scales, 92, will return to the character at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Scales has played the monarch over 500 times in the play in ‘An Evening with Queen Victoria’, both in London and in performances around the world until 2007.
She also appeared as Queen Victoria in the children’s TV ‘Station Jim’ in 2001 and in BBC drama ‘Victoria: An Intimate History in 2003.
In an interactive history project, she featured once recording a monologue for a projection in front of the statue of Queen Victoria on Blackfriars Bridge in London.
Now, the Fawlty Towers star has recorded new voiceovers to play the elderly monarch once again in a reprisal of the 1979 show, now called ‘Queen’.
Scales steps back into the role of Queen Victoria while living with vascular dementia.
Looking for Victoria (2003): Performing the role of Queen Victoria 44 years ago, Scales, 92, will return to the character at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
An Evening with Queen Victoria (1980): Scales has played the character over 500 times
Looking for Victoria (2003): Scales steps back into the role of Queen Victoria while living with vascular dementia
The show’s writer Julian Machin said the veteran actress ‘exceeded all expectations’ with her performance.
He told The Telegraph: ‘Although Prunella has vascular dementia, which greatly affects her in many ways, she absolutely retains longer-term memory of herself and her working experience.’
After almost 50 years playing Queen Victoria, Machin said that ‘her memory of having said the lines so many times over the years made it much easier to direct her than even I’d hoped for.’
Alongside husband and actor Timothy West, Scales revealed her diagnosis in 2014 during their Channel 4 show ‘Great Canal Journeys’.
The couple celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary last year and spoke to the BBC about Scales’s worsening health.
The touching interview saw Scales who has had symptoms of vascular dementia for more than 20 years, say to her husband, 89: ‘Thanks for sticking with me for so long.’
West responded: ‘Well, we’ve done all right’ before asking her ‘It hasn’t really been hard work, has it?’
Scales, best known for playing Sybil Fawlty (pictured) in Fawlty Towers, ended her 67-year acting career in early 2020
The veteran acting couple pictured together in When We Were Married in 1986
Last year, West, who shares a home in Wandsworth with his wife, admitted he misses the ‘companionship’ of his ‘best friend’ as her dementia battle continues.
The couple, who ‘fell in love over crosswords and packets of Polo mints’, first addressed Scale’s condition after she began struggling with her lines on stage in the early noughties.
West explained that by 2003, Scales, who was performing in A Woman of No Importance, was relying on ‘idiot boards’ to get her through the show.
They did not receive a formal diagnosis until 10 years later and he explained that the progression of her illness had ‘taken a very long time’.
Scales ended her 67-year acting career in early 2020.
In a foreword to the book of their Channel 4 show, ‘Our Great Canal Journeys’, the actress wrote: ‘How do I feel about being in this situation? Well, angry of course. I hate the idea that the world is going on around me, but that so much of it is closed off. I soon forget my anger, though, as I forget nearly everything else.’
West published a book recently, Pru and Me: The Amazing Marriage of Prunella Scales and Timothy West, discussing the couple’s decades of marriage and how they’ve coped with the progression of Scale’s illness.
