The Mail on Sunday newspaper tonight "utterly refuted" a suggestion that it had hacked the phone of actor Hugh Grant.
Bosses issued a denial after Mr Grant had told the Leveson Inquiry of his suspicions about a story published four years ago.
A spokesman for the newspaper said information had come from a freelance journalist who had spoken to a "source".
Mr Grant told Lord Justice Leveson about the "bizarre, left field" story and said he would "love to hear the (Mail on Sunday's) explanation".
He said he had not made the allegation in public before but said he had been preparing documents and going through his "trials and tribulations" when the "penny dropped".
Mr Grant said the story claimed that his relationship with then girlfriend Jemima Khan was on the rocks because of his "late night phone calls with a plummy-voiced studio executive".
He said the story was untrue and he had not been able to think "for the life of me" what the source of the story could be.
The only explanation he could think of was that messages had been left on his phone by an executive's assistant, who had a voice which could be described as "plummy".
"I was preparing these statements, going through these trials and tribulations," he said. "Then the penny dropped."
He added: "I would love to hear what the (Mail on Sunday's) explanation of that is, if it wasn't phone hacking."
The newspaper's spokesman said: "The Mail on Sunday utterly refutes Hugh Grant's claim that they got any story as a result of phone hacking.
"In fact in the case of the story Mr Grant refers to, the information came from a freelance journalist who had been told by a source who was regularly speaking to Jemima Khan."
In April 2007, Mr Grant accepted undisclosed libel damages over claims that his relationship with Ms Khan was destroyed by a flirtation with a film executive - and his conduct over Liz Hurley's wedding.
The settlement of Mr Grant's legal actions over articles in the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail in February 2007 was announced at the High Court in London.
Mr Grant's solicitor, Simon Smith, told Mr Justice Gray that the damages would be donated to the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity.
After that hearing, Mr Grant said in a statement: "I took this action because I was tired of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday papers publishing almost entirely fictional articles about my private life for their own financial gain.
"I'm also hoping that this statement in court might remind people that the so-called 'close friends' or 'close sources' on which these stories claim to be based almost never exist."