Lyubimov's father, Pyotr Zakharovich, was a merchant, who worked for a Scottish company, and his mother, Anna Alexandrovna, was a half-Russian and half-Gypsy schoolteacher.

With Meyerhold, Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Brecht as his spiritual guides, Lyubimov eschewed Soviet drama for the more imaginative worlds of poetry and narrative fiction, which he dramatized, and the classics, which he broke apart, reconstituted and presented from a pronounced critical perspective.

Long a Soviet underground classic, Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita was finally brought to the Russian stage at the Taganka in 1977, in an adaptation by Lyubimov.

[10] Lyubimov's performances — including the well-known Antiworlds, Pugachev, Listen!, and Comrade, believe, as well as newer Before and After, Oberiuty, and Honey — were fed and filled with poetic energy.

In another performance, Fallen and Living, Yuri Lyubimov and David Samoilov built on verses by Pavel Kogan, Semyon Gudzenko and other poets of the World War II generation.

[12] In June 2011, before a performance of Bertolt Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in Czech, the actors of Taganka refused to rehearse unless they were paid first.

In June 2013 Lyubimov staged Alexander Borodin's opera Prince Igor at the Bolshoi Theatre, which was warmly received by audiences and critics.

[6] Leonardo Shapiro concludes that "Lyubimov is probably best known for his daring theatrical adaptations of poetry and novels and his successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) run-ins with Soviet Premiers and Ministers of Culture over forbidden material.

Lyubimov, a director who dominated Russian theatre for half a century, died at 97, after being admitted to the Botkin Clinic in Moscow with heart failure.

The prize organization stated: There is a Special Prize for figures displaying particular commitment in combining their own cultural and/or political experience at the highest level with the European ideals and those of peace and coexistence between peoples (...) The Jury of the 14th edition unanimously awarded this to the legendary Russian director Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov for his unquestionable artistic stature and the crucial role that he and the Taganka Theatre played in the delicate phase of perestroika marking the transition from the Soviet Union to contemporary Russia.