Robert Vahey
Robert Vahey is an actor, born 1932.
Seventy-five episodes as a boat builder is a run most jobbing actors would take without reading the script. Robert Vahey, born in Birkenhead in 1932, spent decades in the British supporting ranks, the sort of performer whose name almost nobody knows and whose face turned up almost everywhere: Samson and Delilah, Z-Cars, Secret Army, Only Fools and Horses, Mapp and Lucia, Wycliffe, and, right at the end, the Ricky Gervais comedy Derek. None of those are among the credits listed here.
What is listed is the spine of the career. He played Bill Sayers, the boat builder, in Howards' Way, the 1980s BBC drama that gave him his longest run and the role he is still best remembered for. Before that there is a postman in Citizen Smith, exactly the sort of one-scene part that fills the decades between regular jobs. And in 2003 he turns up in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, credited as Elderly Hunter: a big-budget adaptation hiring a British character actor for a few lines of texture.
That is the shape of a working life on British television. A great many small parts, one part that lasted, and a late run of occasional calls. He died in 2013.
Movies (1)
TV (2)
Where to start with Robert Vahey
Only one credit here gives him any room, so start there: Howards' Way, where as boat builder Bill Sayers he is part of the furniture of a series about money, yachts and social climbing on the south coast, and the furniture is precisely why that sort of drama works. Citizen Smith offers the opposite, a single-scene postman in a 1970s sitcom, and it illustrates the work that fills a British character actor's decades better than any showreel would. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the odd late credit, a big-budget adaptation in which he plays an Elderly Hunter, and while it is not a good film it is a genuine pleasure to spot him in it.