I genuinely can’t remember crying.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 March 2026 source ↗
The question
What most recently moved you to tears?Originally asked
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A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
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I genuinely can’t remember crying.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 March 2026 source ↗
Last Monday was a really emotional day for me: my last son graduated from high school and he’s going on a mission for the Mormon Church soon. I’ve already experienced it four times with my other sons: my oldest went to London, my second son to Italy, my third to Scotland and my fourth the Netherlands. They come back, but the little boy stays out there. He never comes back.
This sounds so silly, but I cry with happiness all the time. I cry when my flowers open!
When my dad died this year.
Walking along Oxford Street on Saturday pulling a shopping trolley that my mother bought me. I remember saying, “I’m never going to use that!” and there I was, very grateful to have it in my life. She died before Christmas and I can’t ring her to tell her that she was right.
I was happiest in every aspect of my life in the 1990s, when I was married to Paddy [King, a management consultant] and we had the two children and my mum lived with us, and Countdown was the biggest show on Channel 4.
I still say yes to too many things.
A fighter pilot.
My aeroplane, a Diamond DA42. It’s a twin-engine aircraft and I bought her brand new to fly around the world solo. Very sadly my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer about six weeks before I was due to take off, in May 2017, and she died early June. After that, I lost interest in doing it.
There are one or two relationships where I’d see the red flags much earlier.
Like I would die for them in a nanosecond.
Charles Dance, Martin Clunes, Craig Revel Horwood, Tony Ross, Robert Bathurst, Ben Kingsley
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