Actress, Singer, Comedienne. A sexy blonde performer of the 1960s and 1970s, she is remembered for her appearances in roughly 30 feature films. Born Elisabeth Simone Juliette Clemence Hugon, the daughter of composer Georges Hugon, she was raised in the show business milieu, trained in classical ballet at Chatelet, Paris, and at 16 began touring with a Cancan troupe under her own name, Betty Hugon. Betty made her silver screen bow in the 1955 “Paris Mob” and in 1957 had her first major stage hit in her old teacher Marcel Achard’s “Patate”. Blessed with a good singing voice, a vivacious personality, excellent comedic timing and mimicry talent, and a superficial resemblance to Brigitte Bardot, she had a successful nightclub and Cabaret act, now billed as “Betty Lawrence”. Urged by Achard to choose a new name, she picked “Sophie” for reasons unknown and took her mother’s maiden name, “Daumier”. In the early 1960s, Sophie teamed-up with actor and writer Guy Bedos, appearing on stage with him in pieces having such low-brow titles as “Up the Sluts” and “Pickups”. The couple married in 1965 and thru the 1960s and 1970s, Sophie, often paired with Bedos, continued her movie work, with some of her better known films including “Carom Shots” and “Sweet and Sour” (both 1963), 1965’s “Crime on a Summer Morning”, and the 1978 “A Simple Story”. Gradually there were problems, with Sophie’s antics funny until the day came when they no longer were; always a bit ‘zany’, she now became impossible either to work or to live with. Unable or unwilling to take stage direction, she was violent and destructive at home, leading to divorce in 1977. After her final screen turn in 1979’s “The Frozen”, she published her autobiography entitled “Talk to My Heart, My Head is Sick” in 1980. Her head was, indeed, sick, the source of her bizarre behavior and of her random spastic, technically choreoathetoid, movements becoming clear when she was diagnosed with Huntington’s Chorea, an autosomal dominant hereditary, progressive, and 100% fatal neuromuscular disorder that typically manifests in a person’s  40s. Stating that he would never have left her had he known the reason for her problems, Bedos, who had remarried in 1978, assumed the financial responsibility of Sophie’s care for the remainder of her life as she became semi-vegetative. The date of her death is sometimes listed as January 1, 2004; a portion of her film legacy has been preserved on DVD along with at least one music CD. (bio by: Bob Hufford)