Yevgeny Matveyev

Yevgeny Semyonovich Matveyev (, ; 8 March 1922 – 1 June 2003) was a Soviet and Russian actor and film director who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1974. He is best known as Nagulnov in Virgin Soil Upturned, based on Mikhail Sholokhov's novel; and Nekhludov in Resurrection, based on Leo Tolstoy's novel. Early years Yevgeny Matveyev was born in the village of Novoukrainka in the Mykolaiv Governorate of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kherson Oblast, Ukraine) 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. His father left Nadezhda shortly after he was born. He 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. He made his first step on the professional stage at the Kherson Theater, in 1939. One of his first small stage roles was a part of a musician in Bestalanna. 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. Doing so, Matveyev studied under Dovzhenko at the acting school of the Kiev Film Studio in 1940 and 1941.