The attention-seeking Jerry Hall is getting ready to break the world record for the number of theatre appearances in one evening. The Texan tottered around the West End last night to perform six roles in Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Fame, Blood Brothers, Anything Goes and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Perhaps she played a character called Truly Ridiculous.

Goldberg has signed a multibook deal with Hyperion’s Jump at the Sun imprint, which specialises in African-American writers.

She said: “If I can give kids and their parents something that’ll make them smile and maybe teach them a little something about living with one another on our planet, it makes me a happy granny.�

It should make a happy granny’s accountant too. Children’s volumes written by Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal have raked in the cash and Goldberg even has a captive audience from her children’s television show Whoopi’s Littleburg.

ATTENBOROUGH SCION MAKES HIS ENTRANCE

LUVVIES, like buses and overwritten fantasy books by J. R. R. Tolkien, come in threes, so it was only a matter of time before the Attenborough family unleashed the third generation of its theatrical dynasty. Not to be outdone by the Redgraves or the Houstons, Lord Attenborough’s clan have unveiled Tom Attenborough, grandson of Dickie and son of Michael, artistic director of the Almeida Theatre in North London.

Tom’s directorial debut is Joe Orton’s classic farce Loot, showing this week at St Paul’s, the £13,000-a-year public school in southwest London. It is an apt choice for the new director. Lord Attenborough starred as the lead in the 1970 film version of Loot, and Michael directed Orton’s What the Butler Saw at the Young Vic in 1979.

Tom isn’t a total newcomer to showbusiness, however. Despite having just finished his GCSEs, he has already starred alongside John Hurt as Christopher Robin in The Tigger Movie and with Stephen Fry in the video game of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

PS . . .

Readers might like to be reminded that this first job ended in a monosyllabic Depp being turned into a bubbling soup of blood and gore by Freddy Krueger. Obviously the roles got better.

E-mail: people@thetimes.co.uk

Andrew Pierce is away