Yankovsky's father was arrested during the purges in the Red Army after the Tukhachevsky case and was deported with his family to Kazakhstan, where he died in the camps of the Gulag system.

In Minsk, youngest Yankovsky made his debut on the stage – it was necessary to substitute the sick performer of the episodic role of the boy in the play The Drummer.

After graduation, he was accepted into the troupe of the Saratov Drama Theater, where for eight years of work he played a number of leading roles.

During his prolific screen career, Yankovsky appeared in many film adaptations of Russian classics, notably A Hunting Accident (1977) and The Kreutzer Sonata (1987).

In the early 1990s, Yankovsky also played quite different roles in Georgiy Daneliya’s tragic comedy Passport (1990) and in Karen Shakhnazarov’s historical and psychological drama The Assassin of the Tsar (1991).