Soviet and Russian actor, theatre director, screenwriter, teacher, TV presenter, memoirist, and artistic director of the Moscow Academic Satire Theatre (since 2000); People's Artist of the RSFSR (1989). Full holder of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland. Aleksandr Shirvindt was born into a Jewish family at Maternity Hospital No. 7 named after G. L. Grauerman. His father was the violinist and music teacher Anatoly Gustavovich (Teodor Gdalyevich) Shirvindt (1896-1961), who played in the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra and later taught at the A. A. Yaroshevsky Music College. His mother was the actress Raisa Samoylovna Shirvindt (née Kobylivker; 1896-1985), a graduate of the Second Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre and a student of Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko, who later became chief editor of the concert department of the Moscow Philharmonic. After the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War he was evacuated to the town of Cherdyn (now Perm Krai, Russia), where he remained until 1943.

He graduated from Secondary School No. 110 in Moscow. He was in the same class as Sergei Khrushchev. After finishing school he applied to two institutions of higher education: the B. V. Shchukin Theatre School and the Faculty of Law at Moscow State University. In 1957 he married Natalya Nikolayevna Belousova (born 1935), an architect and niece of the chemist B. P. Belousov. Their son Mikhail Aleksandrovich Shirvindt (born 1958) was born from the marriage; he has three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Shirvindt is a sports fan and enjoys football (he supports Moscow's Torpedo), basketball, biathlon and snooker. From 1946, for seventy-two years, he was a friend and (1957-2017) a constant stage partner of Mikhail Derzhavin. In the mid-1980s they co-hosted the television programme Morning Mail, and in 2013 the programme I Want to Know.