[2] His paternal great-grandfather, Ivan Ivanovich Utin, came from serfs and was raised in a wealthy peasant family under the Tabakov surname.

His grandfather, Kondratiy Tabakov, worked as a locksmith in Saratov where he built himself a house and married a local commoner Anna Konstantinovna Matveeva.

Oleg's father, Pavel Kondratievich Tabakov, worked at the State Regional Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology "Microbe" in Saratov.

[3] His maternal grandfather, Andrei Frantzevich Piontkovsky, was a Polish nobleman who owned lands in the Podolia Governorate and married a local villager, Olga Terentievna (surname unknown) of Ukrainian origin.

She had a daughter Mirra from the previous marriage to Gugo Goldstern, a high-ranking Soviet functionary and intelligence officer killed in the line of duty.

He was featured in Grigori Chukhrai's Clear Skies (1961), Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace (1966–67), TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973) and D'Artagnan and Three Musketeers (1978), the Academy Award-winning Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears (1980), Nikita Mikhalkov's Oblomov (1981) and Dark Eyes (1986), and the mock red western A Man from the Boulevard des Capuchines (1987).

Tabakov has lent his distinctive, purr-like voice to a number of animated characters, including the talking cat Matroskin in Three from Prostokvashino and its sequels.

[9] During the 2012 Russian presidential election, Tabakov was registered as a "Trusted Representative" (Доверенное Лицо) of Vladimir Putin.