Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, New York, the son of Herma (née Robinson; 1918–1979) and Borislav Bogdanovich (1899–1970), a Serbian painter and pianist. His Austrian-born mother was Jewish (her family moved from Vienna to Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1932); his father was a Serbian Orthodox Christian; the two arrived in the U.S. in May 1939. He graduated from New York City’s Collegiate School in 1957 and studied acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory. He is fluent in Serbian, having learned it before English.

In 1966, following the example of Cahiers du Cinéma critics Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, who had created the Nouvelle Vague (“New Wave”) by making their own films, Bogdanovich decided to become a director. With his wife Polly Platt, he headed for Los Angeles, skipping out on the rent in the process.

In 1970, Bogdanovich was commissioned by the American Film Institute to direct a documentary about John Ford for their tribute, Directed by John Ford (1971). The resulting film included candid interviews with John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, and was narrated by Orson Welles. Out of circulation for years due to licensing issues, Bogdanovich and TCM released it in 2006, featuring newer, pristine film clips, and additional interviews with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill, Harry Carey Jr., Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and others.

The 32-year-old Bogdanovich was hailed by critics as a “Wellesian” wunderkind when his best-received film, The Last Picture Show, was released in 1971. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, and won two statues, for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson in the supporting acting categories. Bogdanovich co-wrote the screenplay with Larry McMurtry, and it won the 1971 BAFTA award for Best Screenplay. Bogdanovich cast the 21-year-old model Cybill Shepherd in a major role in the film and fell in love with her, an affair that eventually led to his divorce from Polly Platt, his longtime artistic collaborator and the mother of his two daughters.

Paper Moon, a Depression-era comedy starring Ryan O’Neal that won his 10-year-old daughter Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, proved the high-water mark of Bogdanovich’s career. Forced to share the profits with his fellow directors, Bogdanovich became dissatisfied with the arrangement. The Directors Company subsequently produced only two more pictures, Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), which was nominated for Best Picture in 1974 alongside The Godfather Part II, and Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, which had a lackluster critical reception.

In 1975, he sued Universal for breaching a contract to produce and direct Bugsy.

Daisy Miller (1974) was a disappointment at the box office. At Long Last Love (1975), and Nickelodeon (1976) were critical and box office disasters, severely damaging his standing in the film community. Daisy Miller and At Long Last Love featured Cybill Shepherd. Feeling against Bogdanovich began to turn. “I was dumb. I made a lot of mistakes”, he said in 1976.

Bogdanovich turned back to writing as his directorial career sagged, beginning with The Killing of the Unicorn – Dorothy Stratten 1960–1980, a memoir published in 1984. Teresa Carpenter’s “Death of a Playmate” article about Dorothy Stratten’s murder was published in The Village Voice and won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize, and while Bogdanovich did not criticize Carpenter’s article in his book, she had lambasted both Bogdanovich and Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, claiming that Stratten was a victim of them as much as of her husband, Paul Snider, who killed her and himself. Carpenter’s article served as the basis of Bob Fosse’s film Star 80 (1983), in which Bogdanovich, for legal reasons, was portrayed as the fictional director “Aram Nicholas”, a sympathetic but possibly misguided and naive character.

Bogdanovich took over distribution of They All Laughed himself. He later blamed this for why he had to declare bankruptcy in 1985. He declared he had a monthly income of $75,000 and monthly expenses of $200,000.

In the early 80s, Bogdanovich wanted to make I’ll Remember April with John Cassavetes and The Lady in the Moon written with Larry McMurtry. He made the film Mask instead, released in 1985.

On December 30, 1988, the 49-year-old Bogdanovich married 20-year-old Louise Stratten, Dorothy’s younger sister. The couple divorced in 2001.

Bogdanovich’s 1990 sequel to The Last Picture Show, Texasville, was a critical and box office disappointment.

Bogdanovich directed two more theatrical films in 1992 and 1993, but their failure kept him off the big screen for several years. One, Noises Off, based on the Michael Frayn play, has subsequently developed a strong cult following, while the other, The Thing Called Love, is better known as one of River Phoenix’s last roles before his untimely death.

In 1998, the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress named The Last Picture Show to the National Film Registry, an honor awarded only to “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films.”

In 2001, Bogdanovich resurfaced with The Cat’s Meow. Returning once again to a reworking of the past, this time the supposed murder of director Thomas Ince by Orson Welles’s bête noire William Randolph Hearst, The Cat’s Meow was a modest critical success but made little money at the box office. Bogdanovich says he was told the story of the alleged Ince murder by Welles, who in turn said he heard it from writer Charles Lederer.

Both films occasioned major disputes between Bogdanovich, who still demanded a measure of control over his films, and the studios, which controlled the financing and final cut of both films. Mask was released with a song score by Bob Seger against Bogdanovich’s wishes (he favored Bruce Springsteen), and Bogdanovich has often complained that the version of Texasville that was released was not the film he had intended. A director’s cut of Mask, slightly longer and with Springsteen’s songs, was belatedly released on DVD in 2006. A director’s cut of Texasville was released on LaserDisc, and the theatrical cut was released on DVD by MGM in 2005. Around the time of the release of Texasville, Bogdanovich also revisited his earliest success, The Last Picture Show, and produced a slightly modified director’s cut. Since that time, his recut has been the only available version of the film.

Bogdanovich hosted The Essentials on Turner Classic Movies, but was replaced in May 2006 by TCM host Robert Osborne and film critic Molly Haskell. Bogdanovich has hosted introductions to movies on Criterion Collection DVDs, and has had a supporting role as a fictional version of himself in the Showtime comedy series Out of Order. He will next appear in The Dream Factory.

In 2006, Bogdanovich joined forces with ClickStar, where he hosts a classic film channel, Peter Bogdanovich’s Golden Age of Movies. Bogdanovich also writes a blog for the site. In 2003, he appeared in the BBC documentary, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and in 2006, he appeared in the documentary Wanderlust.

In 2007, Bogdanovich was presented with an award for outstanding contribution to film preservation by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In 2010, Bogdanovich joined the directing faculty at the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. On April 17, 2010, he was awarded the Master of Cinema Award at the 12th Annual RiverRun International Film Festival. In 2011, he was given the Auteur Award by the International Press Academy, which is awarded to filmmakers whose singular vision and unique artistic control over the elements of production give a personal and signature style to their films.

In 2012, Bogdanovich made news with an essay in The Hollywood Reporter, published in the aftermath of the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting, in which he argued against excessive violence in the movies:

Bogdanovich’s most recent narrative film, She’s Funny That Way, was released in theaters and on demand in 2014, followed by the documentary The Great Buster: A Celebration in 2018.