Donald Sutherland
Canadian actor
When I was less well informed.
When were you happiest?
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Recently, when I got out of hospital and into my own bed with my wife and 10-year-old son; we watched some crap television and life had never seemed better.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 December 2016 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 577 →
Jaime Winstone
English actress
At work, doing what I do best.
James Patterson
American author
One of the big moments was the birth of our son, Jack – he's 13 now.
Kate Nash
British musician
British summers give me a really happy feeling. My bedroom at our family home in Harrow looks out on to our garden and a cricket field, and you just know when it’s the first day of summer.
More from John Simpson
View profile →Reading the news. It’s a dull job.
Comfort, warmth and security.
I’d like to say sorry to my mother. I had to choose between my parents, and I chose my father because he didn’t have any other kids. (My mother was a war widow and had two children from her first marriage.) I thought, in a childish way, that one had to be fair. It was very difficult for my mother and me, and we never really got over it.
The problem with my job is that you meet people you admire and then you don’t admire them so much. The only one I carried on admiring was Nelson Mandela.
I would have behaved better to my first wife, and the girl I lived with afterwards. I was always away.
More on time & hindsight
- What is the most important lesson life has taught you? 137 answers
- What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore? 77 answers
- What scares you about getting older? 61 answers
- What is the best advice you have ever received? 28 answers
- If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say and why? 23 answers
- What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself? 22 answers
Also answered this
Jesse Jackson, Zoë Heller, Clive Myrie, Mike Wallace, Desmond Tutu, Joan Bakewell
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject