Rådhusgatan 51 - Sune Mangs

Bengt Sune Mangs

Actor and revue artist

(b. 1932 - d. 1994)

Sune Mangs was an actor and revue artist known mostly to Swedish television and theatre audiences. He was born in Kaskinen in 1932 as Bengt Mangs. He got the nickname 'Sune' after moving to Sweden and becoming an actor there. Sune's father, Runar, owned the only carpentry and furniture business in Kaskinen which he had in this house.

As a child, Sune often went fishing and earned small change by selling his catch. Another profitable venture was rowing party-minded people to the popular dance pavilion of Tervahovi on the nearby island Eskilsö - a proper ferry connection wouldn't be established until the 1980s. There were plenty of merrily drunken customers to serve on summer nights.

Sune was a small but strong child of the war years. He played outdoors a lot and had the good fortune of having fish to eat in the tough years of the Second World War, when there was a serious shortage of food in Finland. Whenever a ship with Baltic herring was arriving, the children of Kaskinen biked to the fishing harbour to buy some.

Sune's parents divorced during the war. He and his siblings all moved to Stockholm with their mother but he spent his holidays with his father at Raatihuoneenkatu 51. In Kaskinen, he had dreamt of a career in acting as he watched Charlie Chaplin films and the antics of Laurel and Hardy in Kaskinen's cinema, Bio Espis. In Stockholm, he found his chance to start work as an amateur actor. Serious studies in acting soon followed.

He is known among Swedes for his roles in many popular television series from as recently as the 1990s. In the last decade of his career, he also played important roles in major film productions such as Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander and Gunnlaugsson's In the Shadow of the Raven.

He was also known for his fantastic sense of comedy and made a career for himself on stage alongside the biggest names in Swedish revue theatre and for singing humorous songs.

His final role was in a production centred on Madicken, a beloved character from Astrid Lindgren's children's books. He fainted mid-show, falling while on-stage at Stockholm's Göta Lejon theatre, and he died of a heart attack the following New Year's Eve, on his 61st birthday.