Marlene is a contraction of Maria + Magdalene. One of the first major movie stars to publicly renounce Nazi Germany — she became a US citizen in 1939, performed for Allied troops during WWII, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honour.
Subject of Maximilian Schell's documentary Marlene (1984).
Marlene does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Marlene reduce to 5, The Seeker. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.