18 Facts About Yevgeny Matveyev

Yevgeny Semyonovich Matveyev was a Soviet and Russian actor and film director who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1974.

Yevgeny Matveyev was born in the village of Novoukrainka in the Mykolaiv Governorate of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to Semyon Kalinovich Matveyev, a Russian Red Army serviceman was stationed in the region at the end of the Russian Civil War, and Nadezhda Fyodorovna Kovalenko, a Ukrainian peasant woman, on 8 March 1922.

Yevgeny Matveyev's father left Nadezhda shortly after he was born.

Yevgeny Matveyev attended school in the nearby town of Tsyurupinsk, where he saw his first play and left school after the ninth grade to pursue a career in acting.

Yevgeny Matveyev made his first step on the professional stage at the Kherson Theater, in 1939.

Russian actor Nikolay Cherkasov noticed the young talent and advised Matveyev to continue his acting career, by moving to Kyiv to study with Alexander Dovzhenko.

Yevgeny Matveyev joined the Red Army after the German invasion in 1941, and went to military school in Tyumen.

In 1952, Yevgeny Matveyev went to Moscow to join the famed Maly Theater, where he continued his stage career until 1968.

Yevgeny Matveyev broke into film in the 1950s, when he starred as Sudbinin in Andrey Frolov's 1955 film Good Morning, a musical comedy.

Yevgeny Matveyev played the leading part of Konstantin Davydov in The House I Live In, a 1955 film by Lev Kulidzhanov and Yakov Segel that won the first prize at the All-Union Film Festival.

Yevgeny Matveyev starred as Budulay, acting alongside Lyudmila Khityaeva in that film.

From 1968 onward, Yevgeny Matveyev completely left theatre and continued his career in the film industry, as a director and an actor.

Yevgeny Matveyev directed a historic-revolutionary film, Romance by Mail, and a melodrama, Deadly Enemy, and played the leading parts in both films; neither picture achieved great success, however.

Yevgeny Matveyev starred as a chairman of collective farm Zakhar Deryugin and Olga Ostroumova was his partner at this time.

Undaunted, at the end of the 1980s, Yevgeny Matveyev returned to cinematography, filming a tragic melodrama Vessel of Patience where he played a leading part, again with Olga Ostroumova as his partner.

Later on, Yevgeny Matveyev took on roles in pictures about criminals, such as The Vacancy of Killer's Place and Clan.

In 1995, Yevgeny Matveyev directed To Love the Russian Way, soon followed by To Love the Russian Way 2, filmed in 1997 with money sent by his fans from all over Russia.

Yevgeny Matveyev died in Moscow from lung cancer on 1 June 2003, and was interred at Novodevichy Cemetery.