The actor Richard Marner, who has died aged 82, left an indelible impression through playing the German Colonel Kurt von Strohm in Nazi-occupied France in the broadly comic television series 'Allo, 'Allo - making the colonel officious, beetle-browed and bungling rather than a stereotypical Hun. Ironically, his own complex personal background might have made it difficult for him to extract seaside-postcard humour from realpolitik, had it not been for his cheerfully extrovert temperament.
The two creators of 'Allo, 'Allo, Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft, had deliberately set out to turn that grim period of European history into a lampoon of all the parties involved. "We have a go at everyone equally," said Croft. "Our Germans are insensitive, nest-feathering and kinky; the French are devious, nest-feathering and immoral, and the British are real twits."
Yet when Marner appeared in episode one of the series in 1982 (he was to remain in it until the final episode in 1992) it was by no means certain that he would flourish in material which made a farce of power politics. He was born in Petrograd in the Soviet Union, the son of Paul Molchanoff, a colonel in the Semionovski regiment, one of two regiments set up for children of children who had played with Peter the Great. When Molchanoff fled with his family to Britain via Finland and Germany seven years after the 1917 revolution, his son, Alexander, was two.
The family first stayed with Alexander's flamboyant great-grandmother Olga Novikov, who lived in Harley Street, having settled in Britain well before the revolution. She had been on visiting terms with Liberal prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, and her attempts to promote Anglo-Russian reconciliation and congenial relations included giving Harley Street tea parties on Thursday afternoons, which gained her the nickname of "the MP for Russia".
Marner kept the name Alexander Molchanoff while he was at Monmouth school in Wales, where be became fluent in English, German and French as well as Russian. Known as Sacha to his friends, he declared that his Monmouth schooling had been the happiest time of his life, and until his death he took the school magazine, The Monmovian.
After leaving school he joined the Royal Air Force, and was posted to South Africa with the Air Training Corps, eventually being invalided out. He did not have any training as an actor, but in the 1950s made his first appearance in the West End in Robert Stolz's Rainbow Square. His cosmopolitanism helped him in many roles, one of the first being his appearance as the Russian officer in Peter Ustinov's The Love Of Four Colonels, a cult paranormal play set in divided Berlin. Ten Minute Alibi and Frieda, with Moira Lister, were two of his other early plays.
In the following decade, he began to carve out a reputation for himself in television. First, in 1960, he played an anaesthetist in The Girl In Pink Pyjamas, the sixth episode in the Danger Man series; he went on to do guest appearances in The Avengers (1961), Suspense (1962), The Trouble Shooters and The Mask of Janus (both 1965), King of the River (1966), The Trouble Shooters (1969), Jason King (1971), The Adventurer (1972), Special Branch (1973), Secret Army (1978) - the drama series that provided the inspiration for 'Allo, 'Allo - and Lovejoy (1994).
Apart from his reputation as an actor, the 1960s saw the development of his reputation as a bon viveur, enthusiastic visitor to the Chelsea Arts Club and talker about his wide range of reading, all of which made him seem more Russian than British, though he tended to keep quiet about his ancestry. He was also a great lover of horse racing.
On films and television, he often played the sorts of part that British actors might have found it more difficult to suggest convincingly. In his first film, in 1951, Appointment With Venus, he played a German. In the same year he appeared in The African Queen as the second officer of the German ship targeted by Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn. He had an uncredited part in Hitchock's 1956 second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, was a German guard in Ice Cold In Alex (1958), a captain in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), an uncredited spacecraft communicator in You Only Live Twice (1967), and a club boss in Birth Of The Beatles (1979). He continued in films up to 2002, when he played President Zorkin in The Sum Of All Fears.
His stage and television experience fused in his last stage engagement, at the London Palladium and in a tour of Australia and New Zealand, when he played Colonel von Strohm in the play based on the television series which had made him an international anti-hero.
In 1947, he married the actor Pauline Farr, who retains Molchanoff as her off-stage name. She survives him as does their daughter Helen.
· Richard Marner (Alexander Molchanoff), actor, born March 27 1921; died March 18 2004.