When I was first acting, in college, a relative came and saw me in Hedda Gabler and she said: “Look in the mirror, you’re not an actor. An actor looks like Mel Gibson.”
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
“You’ll never walk again.” This was when I was eight or nine and recovering from viral encephalitis.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 March 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 122 →This was said about me in a Radio 1 focus group: “I don’t pay my licence fee to hear scummy northerners.”
“And for you, sir?” It happens a lot.
The melanoma has returned in your lung.
More from Maggie O'Farrell
View profile →Darnella Frazier, the teenager who filmed George Floyd’s murder. It took astonishing courage to stand on the pavement in front of those policemen, and we all owe her so much.
Last summer, swimming in a waterfall in Cumbria with my daughters.
To keep going and never give up, and to enjoy it to the absolute full because, at any moment, the curtain can fall.
How long have you got? I have written a memoir and the subtitle is Seventeen Brushes with Death.
Last week, while I was wet-wrapping my child’s chronic eczema.
I started stammering badly the first time I was on live radio, on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4. When I think about it now it brings me out in a cold sweat.
More on failure & regret
- What has been your biggest disappointment? 366 answers
- Who most deserves an apology from you, and why? 209 answers
- If you could edit your past, what would you change? 203 answers
- Which moment embarrassed you most? 122 answers
- How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? 69 answers
- What is the hardest thing that has happened to you, and what did you carry out of it? 36 answers
Also answered this
Richard Coles, Jack Whitehall, Adam Kay, Paapa Essiedu, Robert Carlyle, Leona Lewis
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