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.
Film actress; twice winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress
The loss of physical, financial, and psychological independence.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2005 source ↗
That I’ll die worrying.
That’s a good way of looking at it. It’s me talking to myself, reminiscing on childhood and things I was told as a kid. Just wanting to stay a certain age and not have to grow up—that’s something I’ve always been afraid of.
I am petrified of bikini waxing. I had a very bad experience in 1978.
Never working again.
Doing cryptic crosswords or, equally, reading tales of mystery and imagination.
Nelson Mandela.
The deception and exploitation of the naïve and defenseless.
In their company, each of us doing his/her own thing in perfect harmony.
Champagne.
Thrust into my profession without any training whatsoever, I had to just flounder and just find my way. It was an agonizing experience. It’s like jumping off a diving board in the Olympic contest without knowing how to swim or dive, and I just had to find my way. So one day, I said to Jimmy Cagney, “Jimmy, what is acting?” and he said, “I don’t know.” He said, “All I can tell you is whatever you say, mean it,” and I thought that marvelous counsel.
Julian Clary, Jane Asher, Audra McDonald, Maureen O'Hara, John Malkovich, Michael Flatley
Search the directory for somebody in particular.