Abdrashitov was born in Kharkov (Ukraine) in a Tatar family, moved all over the Soviet Union with his father's military assignments, and moved to Moscow to study nuclear physics in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
Father – Abdrashitov Yusup Shakirovich (1918–1998), military service. Mother – Abdrashitova Galina Nikolaevna (1922–2002), engineer-chemist. Wife – Toidze Natella (1950) is the known painter, recipient of an award the gilded youth of the Russian academy of arts. Son – Abdrashitov Oleg Vadimovich (1973), MFTI finished, after the Colombian university, works in the USA, specialist in area of technologies of informations. Daughter – Abdrashitova Nana Vadimovna (1980), finished RATI (workshop With. Barkhina), theatrical artist.
He developed an interest in film, and began making films in the early 1970s. Many of his films were the result of a long collaboration with the writer Aleksander Mindadze.
The first cinemawork of Vadim Abdrashitov is a record film «Reporting from an asphalt», taken off them on the 1th course of VGIK, was marked many prizes of film festivals of students.
The first film of Vadim Abdrashitov in the large cinema became creative success. Picture «Word for defence» (1976) was in the center of intent attention of criticism and audience – she was looked by 35 million persons. She was marked rewards and prizes of different cinemaforums.
Vadim Abdrashitov – one of not many artists, whose cinema with a striking sequence and penetrating reproduces authentic composition of time which a producer and his heroes are in.