Where do I begin?
The Q&A, The Guardian, 8 February 2025 source ↗
The question
When were you most embarrassed?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
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Where do I begin?
The Q&A, The Guardian, 8 February 2025 source ↗
Forgetting the words to my own songs on stage. I’m a very good mumbler of my own songs. You’d be surprised how few people notice – if you smile and do it confidently, they’re none the wiser.
When I was doing a masterclass at a theatre and I had to leave the stage because I was about to shit my pants.
Shitting myself in New York last November. I was wearing cream trousers. We were going to see my son Matty and his band, the 1975, at Madison Square Garden, and I was walking through the streets, enjoying the sunshine, pretending I was in some kind of video – throwing my hat into the New York sky like Mary Tyler Moore. I saw a couple of people turn and look at me. Now, although I’m not famous in New York, whenever Matty’s there I do get recognised as his mum, so I’m smiling and waving at them. I went back to the hotel room and bent over to get something out of the suitcase, and my husband said: “Do you realise you’ve shat yourself?”
In my 20s I was in a show called The Unauthorised Autobiography of Samantha Brown. The actor who played my dad messed up his lines and it made me laugh so hard that I ended up peeing my pants.
Not following through on things.
A successful marriage, my third.
I’m happy whenever I’m with my wife, Allegra.
“Next! We’re looking for somebody else.”
I’d like my parents to be alive – I miss them.
I worked on a kibbutz in Israel and had to clean out the chicken run. It was like an oven. Inside were rows and rows of chickens that had been shitting for months – the whole floor was six inches deep in chicken shit.
Mike Skinner, Bear Grylls, Ed Harris, Marcus Mumford, Denise Welch, Meghann Fahy
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