Julie Taymor: What kind of death would you consider a good one?

The question

What kind of death would you consider a good one?

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Julie Taymor

Theatre and film director

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

When I am ready. When I have had enough. When I can no longer give anything. When I can no longer appreciate the small beauties. Without pain or remorse.

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 28 October 2022 source ↗

Others on this question

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Diana Athill Editor and memoirist

That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.

Recorded The Guardian, 23 September 2014 source ↗

Kazuo Ishiguro Novelist and screenwriter; Nobel laureate in Literature, 2017

Like Joel McCrea’s character at the end of the movie Ride the High Country. (He says something about “entering his house justified,” sits up to take a last look at the scenery, then rolls contentedly out of the frame.) Or like Bill Nighy’s character at the end of our film Living.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 9 March 2023 source ↗

Gayle King Broadcaster