Joan Rivers
Comedian
Being poor—or, worse, having Kelsey Grammer fight with Teddy Kennedy over who is to drive me home.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
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.
Outliving my kids – and rats.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 11 March 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Dying too young, and spiders.
To be abandoned.
Perfectionism that leads to procrastination.
More from John Simm
View profile →Live in the moment. Enjoy life because time cruelly speeds up as you get older and becomes scarily finite.
Arrogance, bullying, meanness – just try to be kind, it’s not difficult.
Going to pieces while meeting John Squire, the lead guitarist of the Stone Roses, backstage after a gig. I completely lost the ability to speak. I told him I had the same guitars as he’d just used on stage, and when he asked me which ones, the words completely went out of my head and there was a huge pause, and then his wife tapped his shoulder and he wandered off.
After the birth of both my children, although Manchester United winning the treble in 1999 came pretty close.
Working in a very busy bar in the West End when I was trying to pay my way through drama school. I had to dance in a cage in a vest and cycling shorts to Venus by Bananarama, Greased Lightnin’ and Y.M.C.A. every night. It was excruciating.
A couple of years ago we moved to East Sussex – I had been living in London for 35 years – and couldn’t work out why I kept waking up and thinking, what’s that sound? It was actually silence.
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- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
Daryl McCormack, Charles Dance, Robert Glenister, James Norton, David Hasselhoff, Jerry Lewis
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