She became one of the first women of nobility to attend the Imperial School of Dramatic Arts, and she appeared under the stage name of Mariana Fiory in MGM's 1944 film, Song of Russia.

Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, she was a daughter of Olga Valerianovna Karnovich and her first husband, Maj.-Gen. Erik Augustinovich von Pistohlkors.

Olga Valerianovna von Pistohlkors eventually obtained a divorce and married Grand Duke Paul on 10 October 1902 in a Greek Orthodox Church in Livorno, Italy.

Unlike morganatic wives of other Romanov Grand Dukes, Olga never bore the title of "Princess Romanowsky", a name that would have associated her visibly with the Imperial Family.

Between 1905 and the time of Rasputin's murder in 1916, Princess Olga Paley worked hard to make the court of Grand Duke Paul a popular rival to that of the Tsar.

[5] According to Gen. Alexander Spiridovich, chief of the Tsar's Secret Personal Police, it was this rivalry between the competing salons of St. Petersburg that eventually resulted in the monk Gregory Rasputin being introduced to the Imperial Family.

[6] Marianne's older brother, Alexander Erikovich von Pistohlkors, was married to Alexandra Taneyeva, the sister of the Tsarina's lady in waiting, Anna Vyrubova.

Alexander and his wife were thus drawn into Rasputin's circle of supporters, and their conversation at family gatherings strongly affected the opinions of Princess Olga and Grand Duke Paul.

[7] During World War I, when things began going badly on the Russian Front, the newspapers accused Rasputin of exercising a dark and malevolent influence over the Tsar and Tsarina.

Marianne von Pistohlkors was allegedly one of two women and several men present in the palace belonging to Felix Yussupov on the night that Rasputin was lured there on 17 December 1916.

He also knew that his sickly uncle, Grand Duke Paul, was very upset by Dimitri's involvement in the murder and was taking badly the Tsar's decision to exile Dmitri to the Persian front.

At about this time, Marianne and her new husband, Count Nicholas von Zarnekau, made an effort to help the remaining family of the Grand Duke Paul to escape.

According to the memoirs of Marianne's stepsister, Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, "Once in the beginning of July [1918], late at night, when we had been long asleep, there was a knock at my door.

The Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna and her second husband, Prince Sergei Mikhailovitch Putiatin (1893-1966), chose to stay in St. Petersburg, finally escaping to Romania in 1919.

Marianne and Nicholas von Zarnekau managed to escape from Russia some time after 1923 with the help of her first husband, Peter Dournovo (1883-1945), who arranged for their passage to Finland.

In 1930, Marianne divorced Count von Zarnekau, her third husband, and launched her acting career in Europe under the stage name of "Mariana Fiory".

In February 1930, she appeared at the Theatre Mathurins in Paris, starring in the role of a German soldier's grieving fiancee in "The Man I Killed," a dramatization of the war novel L'Homme que j'ai tue.

She first appeared on the New York stage in February 1937 as the lead in Michel Dulud's play "Dans le Noir" at the Barbizon-Plaza theatre.

"The Countess Mariana Zarnekau, daughter of Grand Duke Paul and cousin of the late Russian Czar, scorns titles, knows nothing about dictators, and has no quarrels with Stalinists, but 'adores' the stage and the Brooklyn waterfront."

In October 1939, Hollywood columnist May Mann caught up with Mariana Fiory at a smart Russian perfume bar on Fifth Avenue and heard a similar story.

1, Burke's Peerage, 1977 John Curtis Perry and Constantine V. Pleshakov, The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Saga, Basic Books, 2001, ISBN 0465024637 Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, Random House, 1993.

Edvard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File, Anchor Books, 2001 Guy Richards, The Rescue of the Romanovs, Devon-Adair Co., 1975 Melville H., Marquis de Ruvigny.