January joins Branagh on the Richard Curtis love-boat

Richard Curtis, writer-director of the British smash-hit Love Actually, is assembling the cast for his new film, The Boat That Rocked. For once in a Curtis film - he wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill - there is no part for Hugh Grant. Instead the male stars are Kenneth Branagh and Rhys Ifans, whose career breakthrough came when he played Spike in Notting Hill, but who is currently best known for his relationship with actress Sienna Miller.

The movie is set on a pirate radio station in the 1970s, based on Radio Caroline which broadcast from a ship off Felixstowe. It charts a love triangle between two DJs, played by Branagh and Ifans, and - obligatory in any Curtis film - an American girl.

Following in the footsteps of Andie MacDowell and Julia Roberts is January Jones (pictured), a former Abercrombie & Fitch model who had a small part as an excitable blonde in Love Actually. Jones, 30, has since appeared in the Adam Sandler comedy Anger Management and has a starring role as a suburban housewife in Mad Men, an acclaimed US television drama set in an advertising agency in 1960s New York, which comes to Britain next month.