His father Sergei Georgievich Govorukhin came from Russian Don Cossacks and was arrested as part of the decossackization genocide campaign started by Yakov Sverdlov.

During the Soviet period, Govorukhin became noted for his successful adaptations of adolescent classics, including Robinson Crusoe (1972), Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1981), In Search of the Castaways (1983) and Ten Little Niggers (an adaptation of Agatha Christie's original 1939 novel And Then There Were None) in 1987.

He was good friends with Vladimir Vysotsky and directed three movies starring him – Vertical (1967), White Explosion (1969) and The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (1979), one of the cult films of the late Soviet era.

[7][8] He also dedicated several movies to mountaineering, most notably Vertical and White Explosion which became some of the first examples of this subgenre in the Soviet cinema.

[11] By the start of the 2000s he returned to cinema, co-starring with Alisa Freindlich in the detective TV series Female Logic and releasing another revenge movie, Voroshilov Sharpshooter (with Mikhail Ulyanov in the lead role).

[4] Following the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis, he had abandoned his previous democratic anti-communist convictions and sided with the national-communist opposition.

In 1996, he supported Gennady Zyuganov against Boris Yeltsin during the second round of the presidential election campaign.

In June 2013, he joined the central staff of the All-Russia People's Front, led by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

[citation needed] He also took part in several non-governmental organizations dedicated to helping disabled war veterans.

In 2016, during his 80th birthday, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow awarded him with the II class Order of Sergius of Radonezh.