Quotes from Prunella Scales

Sometimes with good writers you don't spot the theme, but when you come away you realise there has been one.

A good actor just wants to deliver the writing to the audience who've paid that night. There's an agonising desire to get it right.

It doesn't matter what people think about you, so long as they get the play through your performance. Only a few not very good actors go in for self-advertisement.

I'd love to play Constance in 'King John' or Paulina in 'The Winter's Tale.' I'd like to go on working till I drop.

I love live theatre, it's always thrilling and exciting.

John Cleese is a very fast worker and a highly disciplined one.

I grew up in a household that was very friendly towards the theatre and acting.

Everyone said how brilliant of Tom Conti to be in bed in 'Whose Life Is it Anyway?' and only have his head to act with. He should be so bloody lucky. I'm not for a moment disputing that Tom Conti is an absolutely brilliant actor. But he should be so lucky to be stuck upstage in the spotlight, with everyone focused on him.

When you watch some old sitcoms, however charming they are, they have often lost speed over the years. The speed of 'Fawlty Towers' has lasted the distance.

I shouldn't be surprised if John Cleese's scripts don't become set texts for examinations-they're classics. And I can't tell you how service in English hotels has improved since 'Fawlty Towers.'

I feel very grateful for Sybil. 'Fawlty Towers' was very hard to make, but it was very stimulating.

Actors go into it because it gives us the chance to play people a great deal more interesting than we are, and to say things infinitely wittier and more intelligent than anything we could think of.

The charming sitcom is all very well, but good comedy is based on pain and danger and fear.

My mother was originally from Yorkshire and I spent a lot of my childhood there.

I can't bear it when young actors do too much finger-wagging. It spoils the audience's concentration.

Dad was the generation that fought in both world wars, and people married rather later when they had been in the trenches. My mum was an actress and he saw her in a show in London and they married. She stopped acting when she had babies, which is a shame.

In 1940 my mum took a job as under-matron at her old school, which had been evacuated from Eastbourne to Windermere; I got a bursary and spent eight years as a boarder. It was a smashing education; I regret being at a single-sex school, but I had a brother, so knew what guys were.

I've got very little grey hair. It's to do with the genes. My mother and father were the same.

My mother and father were lovely parents, always quite hard up, but very hard-working.

In our profession if you've got an ugly mark or there's anything that cosmetic surgery can do for you I think it's absolutely fine. I would consider it, but I've been very lucky not to have to.

When I had started commuting into London for theatre school, I'd had to sell my uncle's stamp collection for £300.

I stayed a year in the sixth form and there was talk of Cambridge, but I wanted to go to drama school. At 17 and three months I went to the Old Vic School in London. This most remarkable and brilliant drama school lasted only six years because the Old Vic Theatre hadn't the money to go on funding it.

I just think it's useful for people to know that even if you are off the telly you're just an ordinary person who uses the Tube.

The Victorian Age was very stimulating, historically impressive.