Pauline McLynn
Irish character actress and author
A hairdresser – I still want to be a hairdresser.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Change of mind
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Most days, I wanted to be Albrecht in the classical ballet Giselle, dancing until I dropped dead.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 July 2026 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 195 →I was a huge daydreamer and imagined myself as a successful general leading his troops into battle.
Jenny Agutter
English actress
When I was very little, I thought it might be possible to be an angel.
Jessica Brown Findlay
English actress
A ballet dancer. I danced from age two to 19. Giving up was not a choice; I had complications in an ankle operation.
More from Andrew O’Hagan
View profile →My first holy communion, where my trousers were too big for me and fell down, a circumstance which earned me both the instant contempt of the girls and the heightened interest of the priests. That’s just how it was in 1975.
Like getting out of the right side of the bed every morning, even when you don’t.
Somebody once told me I was the spitting image of David Cameron.
Making people smaller than they are because of something they can’t handle in themselves.
The internet. Such potential for good and for levelling up the world, but such a quagmire in reality.
The other day, when I decided that maybe I had been too harsh on mid-period Sting.
More on identity & self
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