Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 March 2026 source ↗
When I was seven I wanted to be a nun. When I was eight, I wanted to be a boy so that I could be anything I wanted. Also, of course, I wanted to be Samantha in Bewitched.
I wanted to race cars.
I had no female role models growing up. I lived an incredibly sheltered life: there was no TV at home and we had no visitors. It wasn’t until rock and pop came into my life that I concocted myself as a role model.
Anything and everything. I watched the Olympics and wanted to be an 800m runner. If I watched Inspector Morse, I wanted to be a pathologist.
I was happiest in every aspect of my life in the 1990s, when I was married to Paddy [King, a management consultant] and we had the two children and my mum lived with us, and Countdown was the biggest show on Channel 4.
I still say yes to too many things.
Living in a campervan for a week with Timmy Mallett for a children’s TV show about 40 years ago.
My aeroplane, a Diamond DA42. It’s a twin-engine aircraft and I bought her brand new to fly around the world solo. Very sadly my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer about six weeks before I was due to take off, in May 2017, and she died early June. After that, I lost interest in doing it.
I genuinely can’t remember crying.
Independent, curious and funny.
Shirley MacLaine, Andrea Bocelli, Richard Coles, Olivia Williams, Rosanna Arquette, Niamh Cusack
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