Wrongly attributed
to Cary Grant.
Some of the most repeated Cary Grant lines are not his. Where a quotation circulates widely but the record does not support it, we record it here with what is actually documented, rather than passing it on.
“To all of you out there who do not know me, I wish you a Merry Christmas, and to all of you who do know me, I ask, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’”
There is no record of Grant delivering any Christmas message containing this line, in any speech, broadcast, or interview. The joke's construction belongs to later stand-up comedy, not to anything he is known to have said.
“Judy, Judy, Judy.”
Grant never spoke this line in any film. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939) he addresses a character named Judy — 'Hello, Judy… Come on, Judy… Now, Judy' — and the phrase was assembled from that and fixed on him by nightclub impressionists, the comedian Larry Storch chief among them. Grant knew the story and enjoyed it: asked in Variety in January 1970 whether he ever said it, he replied that he did say it, but only to friends, as 'an imitation of an imitation of an imitator.'
“Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”
No contemporary record of this telegram exchange exists. Researchers at Quote Investigator found the earliest printed versions only in the late 1950s, and early variants of the same joke were attached to other public figures before it settled on Grant. It is a good joke of uncertain parentage, not a documented remark.
“Acting is a matter of hiding what you have to show and showing what you have to hide.”
This aphorism does not appear in Grant's 1963 autobiography or in any verified interview or transcript, and no primary source has ever been produced for it.
“I made a lot of mistakes out of loneliness. Consequently, I know a great deal about it.”
Circulated only in quotation compilations, with no interview, memoir, or article attached. None of the standard biographies records him saying it in this form.
“I was a failure as a boy and became a success as a man because I always was and always will be Archibald Alexander Leach, only I became better at hiding it than he ever could.”
Fragments of this sentiment do appear in Grant's 1963 autobiographical series, but the sentence as quoted cannot be found in that text or in any other primary source. It reads as a later paraphrase hardened into a quotation.
“Everybody thinks I’m relaxed. I’ve spent my whole life tense.”
This is a compressed, sharpened version of a documented 1971 remark to Look magazine: 'Everybody thinks I'm relaxed. I'm not relaxed at all. It's a very hard-working profession, this acting business, when you do it as I do it.' The tidier wording has no source.
“I improve on misquotation.”
No interview, article, or broadcast has ever been produced for this line. It appears only in quotation compilations from the 2000s onward, usually paired with the genuine screen line 'Insanity runs in my family,' and reads as a later invention riffing on how often Grant was misquoted.