User:Moonraker/ST

Svante Fritz Vilhelm Thunberg (born 10 June 1969) is a Swedish actor, author, and manager, best known outside Sweden as the father of the climate activist Greta Thunberg.

With his wife, he wrote a memoir, Scenes from the Heart (2018), later updated as Our House is on Fire (2020).

Early life
Thunberg is the son of two actors, Olof Thunberg and Mona Andersson, and was born in 1969, four years after his sister Amanda.

He is named after an ancestral cousin, Svante Arrhenius, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903.

Before taking a course in drama studies at the University of Gothenburg, Thunberg appeared with his father in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Life
As a young man, Thunberg acted with the company of the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Riksteatern. In 1998, he appeared in the Sveriges Television drama series Skärgårdsdoktorn. After that, he mostly had small parts in stage productions. In the spring of 2002, Thunberg was playing the part of Joseph Martin Kraus in a television documentary about Kraus, with the opera singer Malena Ernman also in the cast of the production. She fell in love with Thunberg, invited him on a first date, to see the film Amélie, and two months after their first meeting was pregnant; she was delighted when she told Thunberg the news and found he wanted the child. During the pregnancy, Thunberg was working in Sweden at the East Gothland Theatre, the Orion Theatre, and Riksteatern.

On 3 January 2003, Greta Thunberg was born, and Thunberg and Ernman married in July 2004. They had a second daughter, Beata, in November 2005. Ernman’s career was just taking off in 2003, and Thunberg stayed at home to look after their children, selling his Porsche. Ernman was increasingly in demand for overseas appearances, and the whole family would travel to these together. Ernman did not drive, while Thunberg could provide transport when needed. He also acted as manager for his wife’s singing career.

Greta
On his daughter Greta's school strike for the climate, begun in August 2018, Thunberg’s first view was that she should be in school and he could not support her. In September 2018 he said "Greta forced us to change our lives, I didn’t have a clue about the climate. We started looking into it, reading all the books." By 2019, he was managing Greta's career. In July of that year he went with her on the yacht Malizia II, crossing the Atlantic to visit North America.

At the end of 2019, in an interview with BBC Radio, Thunberg spoke of the years of depression Greta Thunberg had suffered and his worries about her. He added "I did all these things, I knew they were the right thing to do... but I didn't do it to save the climate, I did it to save my child."

With his wife, Thunberg wrote a memoir, Scenes from the Heart (2018), which tells the story of the Thunberg family in the years before Greta was well-known. Two years later, with their daughters they published a new edition of the book called Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis (2020), about the family and its views on the climate crisis.