Show me a great actor and I’ll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you’ve seen the devil.

The line trades on Fields’s cultivated persona as a caustic, misanthropic comic and on long-running theatrical stereotypes: that the intense self-absorption and emotional volatility associated (fairly or not) with “great” acting makes for disastrous domestic life. The first sentence frames artistic excellence as incompatible with being a dependable spouse; the second escalates into a gendered slur, casting the “great actress” as uniquely dangerous or morally suspect. Read historically, it reflects early-20th-century anxieties about performers’ respectability and the double standard applied to women on stage and screen. As a quotation today, it is often cited more for its shock value and period misogyny than for any serious insight into acting.