Law unto himself

Some might say it's not much of a stretch for Jude Law to play the laddish ladykiller Alfie in the movie of the same name. But the 31-year-old Londoner is certainly stretching himself with his workload. As well as Alfie, he will be popping up on movie screens in Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow with Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie; as Errol Flynn in The Aviator, Martin Scorsese's biopic of Howard Hughes; in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, he's the voice of the gloomy-Gothic author Snicket. He also shows up in I Heart Huckabees directed by David O. Russell of Three Kings fame, and appears alongside Julia Roberts in Closer, an erotic drama. And a dozen more projects are on the horizon, including playing Sebastian Flyte in a revisiting of Brideshead Revisited, starring in a remake of All the King's Men, and turning up in Superman Returns.

And the reason for all this work? "One reason I chose to do so many films back to back is because a lot of them were shot in London. It was a really pleasant year to be a working dad - to have breakfast with the kids, take them to school, go off to work and return home later to put them to bed." Awwww.

* Alfie opens in the new year.