Julian Clary: What do you fear most?

The question

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.

Julian Clary

English actor, comedian, novelist and presenter

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

Running out of Molecule cologne.

The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 June 2022 source ↗

Others on this question

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Tom Fletcher

I’m afraid of the dark.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 1 November 2025 source ↗

Lily Tomlin Comedian and actor

Being onstage and forgetting why I’m there.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, June 2022 source ↗

Frank McCourt Teacher and memoirist; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography

It was desperate because of certain things, ingredients like my father being an alcoholic, my mother having too many babies in too short a time, no work available in Ireland, and even when my father did get a job he drank the wages. Then there was the harsh kind of schooling we had with school masters who ruled with a stick and then because of the overwhelming presence of the church, which imbued us with fear all the time. So it was fear, dampness, poverty, alcoholism, fear of the church, fear of the school masters, fear in general.

Recorded Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 19 June 1999 source ↗

Shirley Manson Scottish singer and songwriter; lead vocalist of Garbage