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 experience the utter powerlessness of locked-in syndrome.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 July 2025 source ↗
Losing my mind.
Heights, something happening to my children and Manchester United getting good again (I’m a Man City fan).
Losing another child. (I lost one of my sons to suicide when he was 19.)
Being unprepared.
On tour during Christmas vacation at Cambridge with its European Theatre Group, playing Shakespeare. I knew it was the best time of my life.
Glenda Jackson said I was an amateur during rehearsal for The White Devil at the Old Vic. I called her a cow, but that was inadequate.
Facebook and the need to pee.
Every time I got a lucrative voiceover, I bought a picture. The most expensive was by James Gillray.
I wanted to be a doctor, like my father.
When the media, en masse, reported my imminent demise.
Matthew Modine, Sofia Coppola, John Malkovich, Kathy Lette, Aung San Suu Kyi, Helen George
Search the directory for somebody in particular.