Sophiya Haque was an English actress, singer, video jockey and dancer.
Background
Haque was born Syeda Sophia Haque in Portsmouth, Hampshire to a Bangladeshi father and British mother. She was brought up by her mother, Thelma, a divorced schoolteacher. She attended the Priory School, Orpington, and took dancing lessons from the age of two and a half at Mary Forrester"s Rainbow School of Dance before moving at the age of 13 to London (where she lived with her father, Amirul Haque, a restaurateur, and his second wife), training full-time at the Arts Educational Schools, London.
Career
She is best known for playing the role of Poppy Morales in Coronation Street between 2008 and 2009. She was the youngest of three daughters. Haque started as the lead vocalist in the band Akasa.
They signed a deal with Warner Brothers in 1988.
Subsequently she worked as a video jockey for Music Television Asia for seven years and Channel V.
Haque was employed as a presenter at STAR television in Hong Kong in 1992. From 1994, she began appearing on television in India and in 1997 she moved to Mumbai full-time to work on the Channel V India service.
Her first Bollywood film was Khoobsurat, and she later made several more including Mangal Pandey: The Rising. In 2002, Haque returned to the United Kingdom to star as Rani in Andrew Lloyd Webber"s Bombay Dreams.
In 2005, she starred as Kabir Bedi in the West End theatre musical production of The Far Pavilions.
In 2012, she starred as Soraya in Wah! Wah! Girls. In 2008, she took a small supporting role in the film Wanted. In 2012, she appeared in British Broadcasting Corporation"s Fairy Tales series and in 15 episodes of House of Anubis as Senkhara.
She was diagnosed with cancer when she was working in the Michael Grandage production of Privates on Parade, playing the role of, Sylvia Morgan, a Welsh-Indian singer and dancer performing for the British troops in Malaya in 1948.
Around Christmas 2012, Haque was diagnosed with cancer. She developed a lung clot and pneumonia and in the early hours of 17 January 2013, she died in her sleep in a London hospital, while undergoing tests.