Andrew Sachs, the actor who rose to fame in Fawlty Towers, has died at the age of 86 after a four-year battle with dementia.
The actor, best known for playing hapless Spanish waiter Manuel in John Cleese’s sitcom, passed away in a care home last week, his wife has revealed.
Melody Sachs, who cared for him in his final years, disclosed he had suffered vascular dementia, losing his capacity to speak and write in later life.
She said: “He had the best life and the best death you could ever have.”
Sachs won a place in the nation’s hearts for his role in Fawlty Towers, where he played a clueless Spanish waiter who became the butt of John Cleese’s jokes.
His catchphrase, “I know nothing”, and Basil Fawlty’s dismissive “He’s from Barcelona” have gone down in British comedy history, with the Seventies sitcom regularly voted among the best-loved BBC programmes ever made.
Despite his stellar career, Sachs is remembered in recent years for being the innocent victim of a BBC furore in which presenters prank-called him.
In 2008, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand made an obscene calls to him in which they joked about Brand sleeping with his granddaughter Georgina Baillie.
More than 500 people protested to the BBC, which was forced to apologise to Sachs for these “unacceptable and offensive” remarks.
In 2014, Sachs said he remained “disgusted” by the incident, with his wife telling the Daily Mail the episode had been “absolutely horrific”.
The newspaper last night reported the actor had been battling dementia for the past four years and died in a care home last week.
“My heart has been broken every day for a long time,” she said, adding that the actor had remained positive to the end.
“I never once heard him grumble. It wasn’t all doom and gloom; he still worked for two years.
“We were happy, we were always laughing, we never had a dull moment. He had dementia for four years and we didn’t really notice it at first until the memory started going.
“It didn’t get really bad until quite near the end. I nursed Andrew; I was there for every moment of it.”
Mrs Sachs said her husband had been diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2012. The disease, the second-most common form of dementia, in characterised by the often sudden loss of language, speech and memory, along with mood changes.
Mrs Sachs said the actor only lost his capacity to speak in the last few weeks, after suffering three bouts of pneumonia. He spent eight months in a care home, in which his family would read to him and enjoy summer in the garden.