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.
Losing track (see above).
The Q&A, The Guardian, 10 January 2026 source ↗
Being on a Broadway stage and forgetting what the play is.
A bumpy flight … or driving with my son Sam, who drives great, but I still can’t believe he’s old enough.
Danger to my children. And tidal waves.
I’ve always been frightened of the dark. I sometimes wonder whether it stems from being away filming from the age of five. I can remember being devastatingly homesick and having a little nightlight I used to look at to reassure myself things were all right.
A picnic on the beach at Seaforth during the war. Somehow I managed to wriggle through a barbed-wire fence and run across a minefield. My teenage aunt Kat bravely followed suit and rescued me.
I’m embarrassed when I get people’s names wrong.
Last Sunday when all the family came round to celebrate my 88th birthday. (Or was it Saturday. Or the week before, perhaps?)
A lady came up to me in Tesco last year and said, “Excuse me, but didn’t you used to be Roger McGough?”
That it will go on quite happily without me.
I had dreams of becoming the first scouse pope. Unfortunately, the girls got to me first.
Lee Child, Andrea Martin, Mariska Hargitay, Don Rickles, Nuala McGovern, Jon Sopel
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