Diahann Carroll: What is your greatest fear?

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.

Recorded Diahann Carroll said elsewhere, not written here

Walking into a room filled with friends and family singing “Happy Birthday” to me and I am completely naked.

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, February 2014 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 266 →

Felicity Jones British actress

Not enough food in the fridge.

Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 27 May 2023 source ↗

Mark Radcliffe

Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 August 2025 source ↗

Michelle Collins

Being murdered – I listen to too many true-crime podcasts.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 27 April 2024 source ↗

Frank McCourt Teacher and memoirist; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography

It was desperate because of certain things, ingredients like my father being an alcoholic, my mother having too many babies in too short a time, no work available in Ireland, and even when my father did get a job he drank the wages. Then there was the harsh kind of schooling we had with school masters who ruled with a stick and then because of the overwhelming presence of the church, which imbued us with fear all the time. So it was fear, dampness, poverty, alcoholism, fear of the church, fear of the school masters, fear in general.

Recorded Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 19 June 1999 source ↗