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Young actress hits prime time

Sophie Hough featured in new CBC series called 'Intelligence'

The Hough household of Nanaimo plans to be glued to their television Tuesday.

At 9 p.m. that day a new CBC series premieres.

Created by Chris Haddock, the creator of Da Vinci's Inquest, Intelligence features 11-year-old Nanaimo actress Sophie Hough.

"I'm a recurring character in Intelligence," the Grade 6 Rock City Elementary student says.

"I could be in the show once every two weeks or even every third or fourth week. It just depends on where the show is heading," Hough says.

Hough has been studying at Nanaimo's Spotlight Academy. She wants to follow in her father's footsteps.

"My dad is an actor and I've wanted to do it ever since I was about three years old," she says.

Adrian Hough, who has been acting professionally for 23 years, says he was a little reluctant to allow Sophie to start acting professionally.

"She would go on and on about it and finally we sat down and told her we expected her to keep her grades up at school if she were going to pursue acting as a career," he says.

"So far, her grades have been consistent."

Sophie began studying to be an actor as a five-year-old.

The first show she was part of was the 2002 television movie The Pilot's Wife, she says.

Her dad says the producer and director of that show were very impressed with how quickly she memorized the script.

Unfortunately, Sophie says, she doesn't have the same capacity to memorize math equations.

"I'm good at memorizing lines in a script but not necessarily mathematics."

For The Pilot's Wife Sophie also

had to learn how to speak with an English Accent.

As she progresses and becomes more known to people in the industry, the challenges have increased.

When she was much younger, her dad says, "she used to just skip into the audition room."

But now, as she knows how important each audition could be, "I find it nerve wracking," Sophie says.

People who watched one of this summer's big feature films The Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage, saw the Nanaimo actress at work.

"That was my first feature film.

"It was a lot of fun working on it," she says.

The best thing about acting, she says, is playing different roles "and becoming somebody that you're not."

One of the most stressful things about acting is the lack of time she has to prepare for shows.

"Like with Intelligence, we either get the script on the day of the first read through or the day we film," says Sophie.

"This is why being able to learn you lines fast is really important.

"Some people think you have a week to memorize your part but you don't. At the most, you have about a day."

And watching the finished product, either on the big screen or on television can be somewhat surprising as well, she says.

"You'll be watching something you know quite well and then think 'what happened there?

'"There was a scene between that one and what we just saw.'

"Then you realize it was edited out."

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