From Hollywood actors to Olympic athletes and politicians, California’s new Hall of Fame class runs the show with talent and achievements.
Academy Award-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis and former governor/gamer Arnold Schwarzenegger, Olympic champions Janet Evans and Carl Lewis, writers Riane Eisler and Terry McMillan, chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, veteran Mariachi Reyne de Los Ángeles and former leader of the Democratic Republic of the California, John L. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Tuesday.
This class, the 19th in the state’s history, will be formally inducted at a ceremony to be held at the California Museum in Sacramento on March 19 as a celebration of their contributions to public life, intelligence, and social progress,” Newsom’s office said.
The inductees “have reshaped our culture and our communities. Strong and innovative, these leaders and luminaries represent the best of California’s spirit,” Newsom said in a statement.
To be inducted, candidates must have lived in California for at least five years and “made achievements that benefit the state, the country and the world,” according to the California Hall of Fame website. To date, 166 Californians have been elected to three governorships since 2006.
Schwarzenegger, 78, served as governor of the 38th empire and the last Republican head of state from 2003 to 2011. His history as a renaissance man includes a career in bodybuilding, which is highlighted. with his Mr. Universe, action movie successpolitical prominence and even the unreliability of tabloid-fodder.
Curtis, 67, a native of Santa Monica, is among Hollywood’s elite and has teamed up with Schwarzenegger in the action blockbuster. “True Lies” in 1994. His acting Career dates to 1977, and received the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2023 for “Everything Everywhere at the Same Time.”
Evans, 54, is a four-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer again Fullerton native who attended Placentia El Dorado High School, Stanford University and USC. He is serving as the chief athletics officer for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.
Lewis, 64, is considered by many one of the greatest athletes in the 20th century. This athlete won 10 medals, nine of them gold, in four Olympics.
Eisler, 88, and McMillan, 74, added multiple salespeople to this Hall of Fame class.
Eisler’s highly acclaimed “Chalice and Blade: Our History, Our Future” examinesalmost 20,000 years of cooperation between men and women and male dominance over the past 5,000 years. The futurist, cultural historian and Holocaust survivor with degrees in sociology and law from UCLA said he was honored last year by Jennifer Siebel Newsom and was recently honored by the Austrian government with the Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class.
“I am very honored at this time in my life to be inducted into the California Hall of Fame,” Eisler wrote in an email. “I have worked tirelessly to help create a better world, and I firmly believe that a new paradigm, a new way of looking at our world and our place in it, is essential.”
McMillan wrote a string of hit songs, including a pair that became major studio hits in the 1990s, “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got her Groove Back,” focuses on the voices of black women.
Matsuhisa, 76, knows about his Nobu Japanese Restaurant, with six locations in California, it has businesses on all five continents.
Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles, founded in South El Monte, rewrote the rules of music, becoming the first all-female mariachi group to perform in over three decades.
Burton, the former chairman of the California Democratic Party who died last year at the age of 92, bragged about politics a job that involved time in the California State Assembly and in the Senate and US House.
“This year’s class embodies the best of California — creativity, resilience and community spirit,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement. “These honorees remind us that innovation and courage thrive when people are uplifted by those around them.”
