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Ace travelled with the Doctor between Dragonfire and Survival. When the Doctor first met Ace she was working as a waitress on the planet Svartos, after being plucked from her home in Perivale by a freak time storm. She had a rebellious streak, and aptitude for making and using explosive devices. She had a bad relationship with her parents and had wanted to run away from her humdrum life, only to find a humdrum life in space. In the course of her travels with the doctor we learnt a lot about her background, such as the fact that she had burnt down a creepy house in Perivale when she was thirteen. When she revisited the house with The Doctor she discovered why she had found it creepy. Her relationship with her mother was explored though never completely explained when she met her own grandmother and mother as a baby in wartime England. She revealed at another time that her best friend, Manesha, had been the subject of a racially-motivated arson attack. When she and The Doctor visited 1960s London she found the open racism of that period hard to understand. She was very much a rebellious teenager when she first joined The Doctor, but matured into a quick-thinking, intelligent young woman under his mentoring. Nothing is known of how and when she left The Doctor. They went off together in the TARDIS after their adventure together in contemporary Perivale and the planet of the Cheetah people.
Sophie Aldred was born 20 August 1962. She attended Blackheath High School before studying drama at the University of Manchester, apparently against the wishes of her father. From university she sang in working men's clubs to obtain her Equity Card, then worked in a children's theatre, appearing in a fringe show, "Underground Men," at a pub theatre in London to get an agent, followed by more children theatre. She was appearing in "Fiddler on the Roof" with Topol in Manchester when she landed the part of Ace in Doctor Who. Sophie's Doctor Who tenure spanned the last nine stories of the programme's original run, from 1987 to 1989. The Ace character was a troubled teenager from West London. The Doctor found her serving milkshakes on an ice-covered planet in the serial Dragonfire. She joined the Doctor on his travels and appeared in several stories that explored her character to a much deeper extent than previous companion characters, though less so than in the new series where the lives of the companions have formed a major part of the plots.
Both before and since Doctor Who, Sophie Aldred has had a varied and busy television career, particularly in children's programming, where she has presented educational programmes such as Corners, Melvin and Maureen's Music-a-grams and the long-running BBC series Words and Pictures. She also played the character Minnie The Mini Magician from Series 8 onwards on CITV's ZZZap!. She has also appeared in a number of theatre productions including a tour of "Daisy Pulls it Off" in which she played the lead, and she played Marjorie Pinchwite in the 1993 West End production of "Lust," a version of "The Country Wife." In 1995 she worked for the Children's Channel on satellite and also Love Call Live for Anglia television with David 'Kid' Jensen.
Sophie has presented several BBC Schools Radio series including Singing Together, Music Workshop, Time and Tune and Music Box. She has also performed on radio and in the theatre. She reprised her role as Ace in the charity special Dimensions in Time and the Doctor Who audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions. She co-wrote the hardback reference book, Ace, The Inside Story of the End of An Era with Mike Tucker, published by Virgin Publishing in 1996. Sophie Aldred married Vince Henderson on July 12, 1997. They have two sons, Adam and William, who make occasional convention appearances with their mother.
Film And TV "Doctor Who" (31 episodes)
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