The question
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.
To be completely alone.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 June 2026 source ↗
Climate change, duh.
I don’t have a great fear of anything. I look at things with positive eyes.
Dying of the same awful disease that took my mother – a particularly aggressive form of dementia called Pick’s disease.
Endless vomiting. That comes from my emetophobia, which is a huge part of my OCD.
I was in a restaurant with my daughter in Los Angeles and I had an accident involving a stomach upset. That was mortifying for both of us.
There was a very large part of my 20s where I was an alcoholic, and an addict. When I lost my dad to cirrhosis, I knew that the only difference between us was that, tragically, he couldn’t stop whereas I could.
Ulysses – I’ve tried many times and never got through it.
Never ever think that things are going to turn out all right.
I cry all the time. It’s embarrassing. I mostly cry when my children perform something at school. My wife regularly says, “Do you see any other fathers weeping?” But I can’t stop myself.
A review of Phèdre said – because I was quite large at the time – Toby Stephens’s Hippolytus needs to get on a StairMaster.
Charles Dance, Rose Tremain, Roger Ebert, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Alexa Chung, Andrew Weil
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