Actor Prunella Scales is now well enough to fully understand the loss of her beloved husband Timothy West, son Samuel has said. Fellow actor West died last month at the age of 90- after years of caring for his beloved wife, who has dementia.
West died on November 12 and his agent released a statement from their three children which read: “After a long and extraordinary life on and off the stage, our darling father Timothy West died peacefully in his sleep yesterday evening. He was 90 years old.
“Tim was with friends and family at the end. He leaves his wife Prunella Scales, to whom he was married for 61 years, a sister, a daughter, two sons, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.”
The statement thanked NHS staff for their care: “All of us will miss him terribly. We would like to thank the incredible NHS staff at St George’s Hospital, Tooting and at Avery Wandsworth for their loving care during his last days.”
Speaking to The Sunday Times, Samuel said about his mother, now 92, “All I am going to say is she’s not really well enough to take it all in.”, reports the Express. The celebrated duo met in the early 1960s while working together on the period TV drama She Died Young, and were known for their close bond, often doing crosswords and writing letters to each other between takes when they were younger.
West once said: “We love writing letters about something that the other person might have missed or not quite understood. We would make each other laugh and make each other find out about things.”
The couple got married in 1963, and Timothy chronicled their journey in his book Pru and Me: A Love Story, published last year to commemorate their diamond anniversary. In 2014, Prunella was formally diagnosed with vascular dementia, a condition that affects memory, thinking, and behaviour.
In a BBC interview last year, Timothy recounted the doctor’s words during the diagnosis: “We went to see a specialist who said, ‘Sorry, this is just something which happens to you when you are older and it’s not going to get any easier, but you can cope with it. Don’t let it get you down.'”.