At the height of his fame, Matveyev's career as an actor came to a sudden end at a holiday celebration in
Nikolaev, in what is now Ukraine: during a show, he fell off a malfunctioning cart; injuring his spine, crushing two disks, and jamming spinal nerves. After a long period of treatment, despite the opinion of his physician, he returned to work. Though the Soviet government had classified him in the third group of individuals with disabilities, those persons who had lost some capacity but were still capable of working, generally part-time; he quit performing on the stage and instead became a film director. His debut as a director was the 1967 film,
The Gypsy, an adaptation of Anatoly Kalinin's novel. He also starred as Budulay, acting alongside
Lyudmila Khityaeva in that film. Matveyev's first picture was greeted with differing opinions in the Soviet Union; though a survey by the magazine
Soviet Screen named him one of the best actors of 1967, there were a lot of critical remarks. From 1968 onward, Matveyev completely left theatre and continued his career in the film industry, as a director and an actor. He 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. Among the many films Matveyev starred in during that period, perhaps
Aleksei Saltykov's
The Siberian Woman (), which garnered him a Best Actor award, and his part in
Taming of the Fire, that of a factory director, show him at his best. In the middle of the 1970s, Yevgeny Matveyev stepped in as a director again. He filmed
Earthly Love and
Destiny. These pictures have a big success and audience sympathy even these social stories have been polished, which was a necessity of
Soviet Era. Matveyev starred as a chairman of
collective farm Zakhar Deryugin and
Olga Ostroumova was his partner at this time. Another notable role in the 1970s was a part in
Soldiers of Freedom, where he played
Leonid Brezhnev,
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This event affected his career dramatically: he became a secretary of the Cinematographers’ Union of the USSR, and all his films received a "green light". But it affected Matveyev's life very quickly; in the middle of the 1980s,
perestroika came, and, with it, came official censure: In 1986, at the Fifth Congress of the Cinematographers' Union, Evgeniy Matveyev was dismissed from his post as secretary, and was punished for his "polished pictures" and his role as Brezhnev. Undaunted, at the end of the 1980s, Matveyev returned to cinematography, filming a tragic melodrama
Vessel of Patience () where he played a leading part, again with
Olga Ostroumova as his partner.
Vessel of Patience was honored with a Spectator Sympathies Prize at the
Constellation / Sozvezdie () film festival, but the picture remains relatively unknown. Later on, Matveyev took on roles in pictures about criminals, such as ''The Vacancy of Killer's Place
and Clan''. In the latter, he re-created Brezhnev once more, but this time in a different context and from a different point of view. == Later years ==