Richard Marner: Movies & Box Office

Richard Marner, born Alexander Pavlovich Molchanoff on 27 March 1921 in Petrograd, Russian SFSR, was the eldest son of Colonel Pavel Molchanoff of the historic Semyonovsky Regiment. After the Russian Revolution his family fled to Finland, then Germany, and finally settled in London where his grandmother, the author Olga Novikoff, lived on Harley Street. Educated at Monmouth School in Wales, young Alexander served as an assistant to the Russian tenor Vladimir Rosing and even performed at Covent Garden before the outbreak of World II. During the war he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, was posted to South Africa with the Air Training Corps, and after being invalided out he adopted the stage name Richard Marner, launching a prolific acting career that spanned over five decades. Marner’s early stage work featured a celebrated portrayal of Dracula, and he quickly became a sought‑after character actor in film and television, appearing in classics such as The African Queen, Ice Cold in Alex, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. He is best remembered for his role as the pompous German Commandant Colonel Kurt von Strohm in the beloved sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, a part he played through all nine series from 1984 to 1992, cementing his place in British pop culture.
Besides acting, Marner was a polyglot fluent in Russian, English, French and German, which landed him roles requiring authentic accents and even a Russian dialogue performance in the Swiss film Four in a Jeep. In 1991 he joined a “Congress of Compatriots” to return briefly to his native Russia, witnessing the first Imperial Russian flag raised in Moscow since 1917. He married Pauline Pfarr in 1947, had one daughter, and retired first to Suffolk before moving to a cottage in Perthshire, Scotland, where he died of bronchopneumonia on 18 March 2004 at the age of 82.