She was an English and speech student at Louisiana State University in 1938 when a New Orleans critic saw her in a school play and suggested to Irving Kahn, a 20th Century-Fox talent scout who was travelling all over the South looking for new faces, that he take a look at her. The actress Dorris Bowdon is best remembered for her role as a member of the Joad family in John Ford's masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and she cut her film career short when she married the writer-producer Nunnally Johnson, making her last film in 1943. Born Dorris Estelle Bowdon in Coldwater, Mississippi, in 1914, she was one of seven children born to James Bowdon, a doctor, and his wife Estelle. She would later recount proudly that her father was the only doctor in the region who would deliver African American babies He died when Dorris was two years old. Dorris Estelle Bowdon, actress: born Coldwater, Mississippi 27 December 1914; married 1940 Nunnally Johnson (died 1977; one son, two daughters); died Woodland Hills, California 9 August 2005. Lorca underlined the point saying that his death "marks the passing of an artist who, in full maturity, could show that the highest art is possible in the fiesta of the bulls."Frank Gray. In retirement, he went on to serve as president of the Andalucia Foundation of Tauromaquia and in 1997 was awarded the Gold Medal for Fine Arts. The two men met in competitive combat in La Maestranza, the Seville bullring and one of the shrines of bullfighting in all Spain.V?uez most admired Marcial Lalanda, as "my one and only manager".
Lalanda was a survivor of the 1920s, one of the so-called golden ages of bullfighting, made famous by Juan Belmonte, Jos?l Gallo and Ni?e la Palma, the character on which the bullfighter-protagonist in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises was based and who was the father of Antonio Ord?.According to Antonio Lorca, a leading bullfight commentator, V?uez will be remembered for his artistic bullfights in the second half of the 20th century. The critics liked what they saw and praised both his grace and gravity.His peers were to be some of the greats of the era, among them Luis Miguel Domingu? Miguel B? ("El Litri"), Antonio Bienvenida and Antonio Chenel, also known as Anto?, a purist like V?uez. His elder brother was Pepe Luis V?uez, Spain's leading matador during the early to mid-1940s. Pepe Luis yielded his supremacy to the legendary Manolete, who was to die in the bullring at Linares in 1947.
Two younger brothers, Rafael and Juan, took up the profession, but did not advance beyond the level of novilleros.Manolo V?uez made his first appearance as the bullring in 1945, aged 16, in the plaza de Carmona in Seville. His big leap forward was in 1951 when his brother Pepe Luis gave him his "alternativa" - a symbolic process akin to a bar mitzvah in which a young matador is propelled into professional adulthood and, thus, is allowed to fight big bulls for the first time, with picadors (mounted horsemen bearing javelin-like shafts used to weaken the bull).In 1953, V?uez tried his luck in the bullrings of Mexico, probably the most popular venue outside Spain. If a matador performs particularly well, the president of the fight can order that one or both of the dead bull's ears be given to him, and on this occasion, Tynan reported,The award of both ears was automatic. As V?uez stood with hand upraised over what he had killed, he might have been a symbol of the majesty of unequal combat, where the end is fixed and only the path to it is unknown, and where, in consequence, art is within the frontiers of possibility.V?uez came from a bullfighting family. "V?uez and his bull had grown together in dignity as the fight progressed and he killed at their joint peak, quite perfectly," Tynan wrote. Nevertheless, when he was fit and able, V?uez could put on memorable performances in the "de frente" style, that is, head on to the bull and fearless.In the mid-1950s, Kenneth Tynan, taking time out from theatre criticism, related in his book Bull Fever (1955) an electrifying performance by V?uez in which the matador had done all that was possible with the bull, only to be wrong-footed and find himself dashed to the earth, V?uez then recovering and setting himself up for the moment of truth. The bullfight historian Walter Johnston noted that V?uez took up muleta and sword over an "astonishing" 32 seasons until his retirement in 1983.It is usually the mark of a great matador that he finds himself completing shorter seasons than his counterparts because of the time lost recuperating from gorings, and in this regard V?uez suffered plenty, thus having to scale back his appearances on average to 20 to 30 bullfight events per year.