[2] After being educated at Monmouth School in Wales, Molchanoff became an assistant to the Russian tenor Vladimir Rosing, where he performed at Covent Garden.

Marner played the minor and uncredited role of a German sentry in the classic war film The Dirty Dozen.

[4][7] An early TV role was his 1960 appearance in Danger Man in the first season episode entitled "The Girl in the Pink Pyjamas" as an anaesthetist.

[9] In 1991, when the President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, convened a "Congress of Compatriots" (an olive branch to some of the post-1917 White Russian diaspora), Marner was one of the 600 people who returned to the motherland.

Despite being caught up in an attempted coup, he stayed long enough to watch, through tearful eyes, the raising of the first Imperial Russian flag flown in Moscow since 1917.