Vasily's father Boris Livanov (1904–1972) was also a prominent actor and stage director who served at the Moscow Art Theatre all his life, while his mother Eugenia Kazimirovna Livanova (née Prawdzic-Filipowicz) (1907–1978) was an artist who belonged to Polish szlachta.

Many famous actors who worked with his father, like Olga Knipper, Alla Tarasova, Vasily Kachalov (whom Livanov was named after), as well as Pyotr Konchalovsky, Boris Pasternak, Valery Chkalov were frequent guests at their house.

The movie was shot in taiga at −40 °C, and the director Mikhail Kalatozov decided that Livanov and Samoilova should voice their characters crying not in the studio, but outside, right in the woods.

[5] Yet his biggest success came with The Bremen Town Musicians animated musical, a modernised adaptation of the eponymous folktale he created with Yuri Entin and Gennady Gladkov.

The leading Soviet pop singer Muslim Magomayev voiced almost all characters in it which only added to the overwhelming popularity of the series (Oleg Anofriyev did the exact same thing in the first film).

On 27 April 2007, a sculpture featuring Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson as portrayed by Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin was opened on the Smolenskaya embankment alongside the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow (sculptor Andrey Orlov).

In 2009 Boris was charged with a murder of Igor Khromov whom he cut with a knife during a drunken brawl; he was imprisoned for nine years, but set free following a parole in 2015.