DOG FINDS DOPE ON SUPERSTAR'S HELPER

A high-profile makeup artist travelling to New Zealand to work on Tom
Cruise's The Last Samurai is to be deported today after a Customs drug dog
sniffed out 9.6g of cannabis resin in her underpants.

Joanne Allen, a British-born 36-year-old, yesterday pleaded guilty in the
Manukau District Court to importing a class-B drug.

Judge Lindsay Moore fined her $2500 plus $130 court costs. Her visa was
instantly revoked.

Allen has recently won acclaim with fellow make-up artist Conor O'Sullivan
for her work with Nicole Kidman in The Hours.

The pair created a prosthetic nose to make Kidman into the writer Virginia
Woolf and turned Ed Harris into a writer dying of Aids, whose skin has been
ravaged by an HIV-related illness.

Allen was picked up by Customs at the luggage carousel at 9.40am on
December 30 as she was waiting for her luggage to come off a United
Airlines flight from Los Angeles.

Officers found the small resin block wrapped in toilet paper and hidden in
her underpants.

She told staff that she used the drug to calm herself.

The comprehensive International Movie Database says Allen has worked on box
office hits like Gladiator, Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Midsummer
Night's Dream.

She was also chief make-up artist on last year's The Four Feathers, which
starred Australian Heath Ledger as a British officer in the colonial-era Sudan.

A publicity spokesman for Samurai said that Allen was to be part of a
make-up team for the movie.

Cruise was travelling with his personal make-up artist.