Get the picture?

It could be the first line of some old Hollywood joke: how do you fit 13 millionaire movie stars on the front cover of a magazine? The damp-squib punchline, however, is that you can't. So this month's Vanity Fair special on the "Kings of Hollywood" gives pride of place to Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt.

It's only by taking the magazine off the rack and opening up the gate-fold sleeve that one can see the other eight "kings" in the picture. These, for the record, include a trio of British actors: Jude Law, Hugh Grant and Ewan McGregor.

All of which shows that there remains a strict hierarchy, even at the top. It's surely no accident that Vanity Fair placed the likes of Hanks, Cruise and Nicholson at far left of shot, guaranteeing them their place on the cover. Ditto, it can only have been by design that the Brits wound up tucked inside the fold, alongside the likes of Don Cheadle and Dennis Quaid. All of them are kings, of course. It's just that some are more kingly than others.

Might this explain the faint air of unease in the faces and postures of our homegrown luminaries? In terms of work, visibility and glowing good looks, Messrs Jude, Hugh and Ewan have surely earned their place in Vanity Fair's baker's dozen. And yet they look notably more self-conscious, less naturally at home than their US counterparts.

Clutching his belly, McGregor seems to be bravely battling a bout of nervous indigestion, while poor old Grant looks to have fallen over just before the picture was snapped. All in all, they remind me of that "Fat Neck" fellow who infiltrated the Manchester United line-up a year or two back; smirking at their good fortune but half-wondering if they're about to be found out.

Or perhaps they simply guessed what was going on, realising that the further to the right they were placed, the less likely they were to make the cover. On the one hand, their appearance on the Vanity Fair cover demonstrates the burgeoning star power of British actors.

On the other, it shows they've still got some way to go. When Hollywood told us that the Brit-pack had been brought inside the fold, we should have known they meant it literally.