As Timothy West dies at 90 after nursing his spouse Prunella Scales for years, CHRISTOPHER STEVENS seems on the enchanting story of the 61-year marriage with a fairly rocky begin

Their love affair, stretching across more than six decades, has been called theatre’s most heartfelt romance since Romeo And Juliet.

Actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales were so completely besotted with each other that for many years they wrote to each other daily, whether they were working apart or living under the same roof.

They remained devoted as he became her carer during her long decline into dementia, and won the affection of a new generation of fans with their adventures on narrowboats, criss-crossing the world’s waterways in ten seasons of Great Canal Journeys for Channel 4.

Tim’s death on Tuesday aged 90, surrounded by family and friends in a London hospital, marks the end of their 61-year marriage. Yet when they met, he was trapped in an unhappy relationship with his first wife, and Pru was about to catch the eye of one of the world’s biggest film stars.

The son and grandson of actors, Tim was born into a dynasty of minor thespians who scraped a living in repertory theatre. He was following their example in 1961 when he signed up for a supporting role in a dire BBC play called She Died Young (‘and none too soon,’ joked the cast).

Pru played a bishop’s daughter in the Regency era who is ravished by a cad. Tim’s only line was: ‘Can’t say I blame him, sir. Dammee, she’s a morsel!’

His father Lockwood West, it turned out, had already worked with Miss Scales, in the Beeb’s lost 1952 version of Pride And Prejudice – he was Mr Collins, she was flighty Lydia.

Pru was astonished to discover that Tim was Lockwood’s son. ‘I could have sworn he was gay!’ she blurted.

The production was held up by an electricians’ strike, and to pass the time Tim and Pru began doing crosswords together, sharing packets of Polos and trying to pretend they weren’t desperately attracted to each other.

When he went back to touring theatre productions, she began sending him fan mail, disguising her handwriting and adopting silly names.

‘Dear Mr West,’ read one, ‘I thought you were lovely in Oxford this week, I saw you several times, oh you were good. Of course you have just the sort of character I like and you certainly do it well, don’t you?’ She signed it, ‘H. Green (Miss).’

But she also wrote to say that she was being pursued by Peter Sellers, the star of a Pinewood movie in which she was appearing, called Waltz Of The Toreadors. Sellers, who was married, badgered her to go to dinner with him and had to be rebuffed half a dozen times.

Soon, she and Tim were snatching every opportunity to be together, taking overnight trains to criss-cross the country between shows. ‘I’ll meet any train you like to catch on Sat night or Sunday morn, and we can go to my flat,’ Pru wrote in one note.

But they had to keep their affair secret. Tim himself was married, to a young woman he’d met when he was reading modern languages at the polytechnic in London’s Regent Street where she was an arts student.

Her name was Jacqueline Boyer, and her family had money – her late father Jack was a former Chelsea FC chairman. As an undergraduate, Tim was dazzled by the cocktail parties her widowed mother threw, but he was also drawn to Jacqueline’s emotionally volatile nature.

Believing she needed to be rescued, he cast himself in the role of her protector. They were married at 21 and had a daughter named Juliet, but soon found out, Tim said, ‘that we didn’t have an awful lot in common, beyond the ability to have a good time’. Jacqueline’s mood swings became more severe: ‘I never knew what I was coming home to,’ he said.

Pru was racked with guilt at being what was then called a ‘homewrecker’, though of course she was nothing of the sort.

Jacqueline admitted to having an affair, and Tim left her – but the conventions of the time meant he chivalrously offered to take the blame for their divorce.

This meant providing evidence of his own adultery. He and Pru, who was referred to in court papers as ‘Miss X’, booked a hotel room in Cheltenham, and arranged for a private detective to discover them there.

Miss X, however, had an early morning call for a film shoot, and the snoop didn’t want to drive to Cheltenham in the small hours. So a compromise was reached: the couple would leave ‘twin indentations on the hotel pillows, and an item of feminine nightwear on the bed’.

In one of her daily letters, Pru confessed: ‘Still frightened of accepting responsibility for something I can’t help regarding, in some way, as a major disaster, although of course it may be a wonderfully Good Thing all round. I am a COWARD. No, actually, it isn’t entirely that, it’s the feeling that perhaps in this case one might be behaving in a horribly selfish and inhuman way, grabbing what one wants for oneself without regard for two people in a weaker position.’

The divorce went through, and on the morning Tim received his decree nisi, they were together in Brighton. Sitting in the car at traffic lights, Pru asked whether they could now be engaged to each other. ‘Sorry,’ Tim replied. ‘Of course – will you marry me?’

He slipped the ring on to her finger but, before they could kiss, the lights changed and they had to drive on.

This peripatetic life was one he’d known from birth. Officially, he was a Yorkshireman, born in 1934 in Bradford, but only because this happened to be where his parents were working that week. As a child during World War II, he grew up in a basement flat in Bristol, before resuming a touring life that saw him attend 13 schools – and getting expelled from at least one.

His parents encouraged him to try a more settled career: ‘They thought they owed it to me to give me a slightly easier life than they’d had.’ His first job, after dropping out of college, was with a firm of furniture dealers in Holborn in central London before training as a recording engineer with EMI.

But he was already in love with the theatre, and spent his evenings rehearsing in am-dram productions. When he was sacked from the music studios for repeatedly falling asleep, he landed a job as an assistant stage manager at a small theatre in Wimbledon – ‘making a few props and playing the odd butler,’ as he put it, for one pound and two shillings a week.

Several years in rep followed. For the rest of his life, Tim could quote lines from the terrible dialogue in the murder mysteries he performed each week – ‘All right, damn you Inspector, so I was there in the morning room . . .’ was one favourite.

But he also was able to appear in plays by Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, Coward and of course Shakespeare, developing a stage style that combined gravitas with a twinkling mischief. This would serve him well throughout his life in television, though he never enjoyed much success in cinema: he was too much a character actor, he believed, to project a film-star image.

By the time he married Pru in 1963, he had landed a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he stayed for several seasons before the lure of touring became too much. He joined the experimental Prospect company around the time that Sam and then Joseph, his sons with Pru, were born. The pressure led to rows that could be explosive.

‘There was a notorious one early on,’ he confessed, ‘in which I apparently pulled out some of Pru’s hair, which she then kept in an envelope.’

Pru confirmed the story: ‘I thought the hair was something I could reproach him with and say, “Look what you did last time we had a row!” ’

The couple must have seen the funny side of these blow-ups, because 30 years later when they published a collection of their love letters, they were laughing about it. Tim admitted, though, that she was better at forgetting their arguments than he was.

‘I hate rowing but then I nurse the unhappiness. I go round gnashing my teeth for hours.’ He poured this energy into a succession of acclaimed roles on TV and stage, including King Lear and Dr Samuel Johnson.

After his award-winning performance as the pleasure-loving monarch in BBC1’s mini-series Edward The Seventh, he began a run of real-life historical figures: Winston Churchill, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, and Sir Thomas Beecham.

His one failing as an actor, said Pru – his sternest critic – was a tendency to be too controlled: ‘When he’s playing an emotive part like King Lear, just occasionally I have to kick him up the bum to become more open and abandoned.’

He was ideally suited to Dickens, playing Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times and Sir Leicester Dedlock in Bleak House. Comedy came just as easily, in the long-running sitcom Brass on ITV. And he was never too proud to appear in soaps, with roles on both Coronation Street and EastEnders.

This appetite for work, which Pru shared, often kept them apart. At a party to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in 1988, he told revellers: ‘When you think of how much time we spend working and how much time Pru spends asleep, we’ve actually only lived together for about a year. But she seems a very sweet girl and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it worked out very well.’

All through their marriage, they retained a wicked flirtatiousness. In her 60s, Pru told an interviewer that Tim was keeping her awake all night and was aggrieved to be asked, ‘Why – does he snore?’ ‘I was furious,’ she said. ‘My sex life is very much there, thank you very much.’

In the same irrepressible vein, she told the Mail that she liked to keep Tim wondering whether she’d ever have an affair. ‘I think it’s highly unlikely Tim has been totally faithful to me all our married life,’ she declared – very much tongue-in-cheek and with an eye to teasing.

‘However, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think he’d be awfully upset if he believed I’d ever been unfaithful. On the other hand, I think he might be ever so slightly bored if he thought I hadn’t. So I like to keep him guessing.’

During her 70s, Pru began to develop memory problems, becoming increasingly forgetful and confused. She was diagnosed with dementia and, though he never retired, Tim devoted his life to caring for her. To stimulate her mind, they returned to an early love, canal boating. Even when she could not remember lines, Pru retained her gift for faultless reading, and in 2014 they recorded a trip for Channel 4.

Nearly 25 years earlier, they had been enthusiastic supporters for the renovation of the Kennet & Avon Canal, and had been the first to navigate its full 42-mile length after it reopened.

Now they made the trip again, and viewers seeing them as themselves for the first time immediately fell in love with their unfeigned affection for each other.

More than 30 more adventures followed, taking the couple not only around Britain and Ireland, but to France, Italy, Canada, and even to Argentina and Vietnam.

To watch them looking out for each other, fussing and teasing, fretting and grumbling, was poignantly touching.

Their travels ended in 2019, when Pru became too frail to continue. ‘The sad thing is,’ Tim said, ‘you just watch the gradual disappearance of the person you knew and loved and were very close to. If you live day-to-day, it is manageable.’

They won praise for their courage in facing dementia publicly and refusing to hide it. Tim remained in demand for TV, appearing in Gentleman Jack, Last Tango In Halifax and, triumphantly, as Private Godfrey in a remake of three lost episodes of Dad’s Army.

He leaves three children and seven grandchildren but, above all, it is Pru, now 92, who will be more lost than ever without him. She once said: ‘One of the horrors of being so happily married for so long is that you wonder how on earth either one of you would cope without the other.

‘I cannot bear to think about the misery of being alone. It is the only dark side of an otherwise very fortunate marriage.’