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.
To be stuck in the past.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 May 2026 source ↗
Regrets. That’s no way to live.
Falling onstage…or anywhere.
Heights. For Children in Need, I had to abseil off the Orbit in the Olympic Park. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve done.
Being confined in a straitjacket.
Steady, reaching, bewildered.
A running accident when I was 14 or 15. I fainted but I was a bit of a jester and they thought I was taking the piss, so I was left for a bit. I woke up in hospital.
A movie. Does it have a name? It might do.
It’s usually a slight feeling that, having got through the day, I didn’t get any time to do any writing or something creative – it was a lot of admin, exhaustion from that and rumination.
Having regrets and not knowing what to do about them.
You reach a certain point in life and suddenly know a lot of dead people, and I’ve noticed you don’t stop getting to know people who are dead. Those relationships continue and I like that.
Rita Moreno, Omid Djalili, Fay Ripley, Lily Tomlin, Angela Griffin, Seth Meyers
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