Mikhail Kozakov was born in the city of Leningrad, RSFSR, USSR. Theater and film actor, director, screenwriter, reciter. Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1969). People's Artist of the RSFSR (12/18/1980). His father was Kozakov Mikhail Emmanuilovich (1897-1954), a well-known writer; his mother was Nikitina Zoya Aleksandrovna (1902-1973), a literary scholar. In the Kozakovs' apartment on the Griboyedov Canal, Evgeny Schwartz, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Anatoly Mariengof, Boris Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova and many other literary celebrities were frequent guests. In 1956 he graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School-Studio. That year was extraordinarily happy in the young actor's life: in the summer Mikhail Romm's film "Murder on Dante Street" was released, and in the autumn of the same year came the role of Hamlet in the remarkable Okhlopkov production at the Mayakovsky Theater. From 1956 to 1959 he was an actor at the Mayakovsky Theater. From 1959 to 1970 he was an actor at the Sovremennik Theater. From 1971 to 1972 he was an actor at the Moscow Art Theater. At the Moscow Art Theater Kozakov staged Leonid Zorin's play "The Copper Grandmother", in which the role of A.S. Pushkin was rehearsed by Rolan Bykov. The production was closed and Kozakov moved to the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya to A. Dunaev and A.V.

Efros. From 1972 to 1981 he was an actor at the Theater on Malaya Bronnaya. By the actor's own admission, he left when he considered it necessary. He left having learned something essential from his teachers. He had three of them - Nikolai Okhlopkov, Oleg Efremov and Anatoly Efros. And from each of them he learned directing. The most important teacher was Oleg Efremov, who was one of his instructors at the Moscow Art Theater School-Studio and the artistic director of Sovremennik. The actor worked actively in cinema, including in vivid, sharply characterized roles, in films of various genres. In 1978 he made his debut as a film director, staging on television the two-part film "The Nameless Star", based on the play by Mikhail Sebastian. In 1999 the actor, together with the saxophonist Igor Butman, staged a concert performance based on the poems of Joseph Brodsky, "Concert for Voice and Saxophone". In 1997 M.M. Kozakov's "Actor's Book" was published, in which he tells about his lived life, about different times and the people of art within them. He passed away after a long illness in a clinic in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv. Mikhail Kozakov is buried in Moscow at the Vvedenskoye Cemetery (section No. 5) next to his parents, as the great actor bequeathed.