[4][5] His father Dmitry Filippovich Papanov (1897–1982) was a retired soldier who served as a railway guard and an amateur actor at the local theatre founded by Nikolai Plotnikov, where Anatoli and his sister also performed as children.

[4][6] His mother Yelena Boleslavovna Roskovskaya (1901–1973) was a Belarus-born[7] Polish milliner who secretly converted from Roman Catholicism to Russian Orthodoxy.

In 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Papanov joined the Red Army and, as a senior sergeant, headed an anti-aircraft warfare platoon on the front lines.

[8][5] Despite his injury, in 1943 Papanov enrolled as a student in the acting faculty of the State Institute of Theatre Arts, taking courses with Vasily Orlov.

During his studies he met his future wife and fellow student Nadezhda Yuryevna Karatayeva (born 1924), who had also served in the war as a nurse on a hospital train.

[9][10] Among his popular roles were Alexander Koreiko in The Little Golden Calf (1958), Kisa Vorobyaninov in The Twelve Chairs (1960, both based on the novels by Ilf and Petrov), Vasily Tyorkin in Aleksandr Tvardovsky's Tyorkin in the Other World (1966), Anton Antonovich in Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1972), Nikolai Shubin in Grigori Gorin's and Arkady Arkanov's Little Comedies of the Big House (1973), Pavel Famusov in Alexander Griboyedov's Woe from Wit (1976), Roman Khludov in Mikhail Bulgakov's Flight (1977), Leonid Gayev in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1984), and others.

[6][11] Apart from performing, Papanov also taught acting at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, and in 1986 he staged his first and last play, The Last Ones by Maxim Gorky.

[16] In 1976, Mark Zakharov directed his own TV adaptation of the book and eventually cast both actors in the leading roles, reuniting them for the last time.

His distinguishing growling voice suited all kind of beasts such as Shere Khan from Adventures of Mowgli (1967), a Soviet adaptation of The Jungle Book.

After work on the movie was finished, Papanov returned from Karelia to his Moscow flat and decided to take a shower although the hot water was off that day.