The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
To be stuck in the past.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 May 2026 source ↗
Nuclear holocaust.
My greatest fear is going out onstage and having the audience just stare at me.
I don’t want to be lost and burn in hell.
Dying of the same awful disease that took my mother – a particularly aggressive form of dementia called Pick’s disease.
A movie. Does it have a name? It might do.
A running accident when I was 14 or 15. I fainted but I was a bit of a jester and they thought I was taking the piss, so I was left for a bit. I woke up in hospital.
You reach a certain point in life and suddenly know a lot of dead people, and I’ve noticed you don’t stop getting to know people who are dead. Those relationships continue and I like that.
Putting chocolate mousse in my agent’s face. Somebody had done it to me – that thing where they go, “Smell this, it smells funny”, and then they put it in your nose. A year later I was in this French restaurant with a very 1980s-style dessert trolley and, before I knew it, I had a bowl of chocolate mousse in front of me. And my agent went, “What’s that smell?”, and it felt impossible not to … I immediately felt awful and tried to apologise. He, of course, said that he found it funny. But I knew he didn’t.
Having regrets and not knowing what to do about them.
Steady, reaching, bewildered.
Lauren Bacall, Sarah Perry, Tony Christie, Timothy Hutton, Jason Manford, Joseph Fiennes
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