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NELLY Furtado has silenced body shamers in a curve-hugging strapless red gown, as she was honored with a Hall of Fame award.

The iconic singer, 47, has faced cruel comments about her figure since her return to the spotlight, but defied the haters to accept the coveted achievement.

Nelly looked stunning in her dress, as she was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the 2026 Juno Awards.

The stunning star oozed sex appeal in the incredible dress as she collected her gong.

The Grammy Award winning artist wore her brown locks tied back, and she accessorised with huge earrings.

Nelly beamed and threw her arms in the air as she walked on stage to be inducted into her native country’s Hall of Fame.

Addressing the audience, the thrilled star said: “Honestly, I’m just really proud to be Canadian. I live in Canada.

“I make my music in Canada.

“I work with Canadian musicians, songwriters, producers because I totally believe in the Canadian dream.

“Please believe it, too.”

It comes after Nelly revealed how she was retiring from performing, after 25 years in the spotlight.

Taking to Instagram last October, the Grammy winner made an emotional post expressing gratitude for her career but that she felt it was time for a change.

Addressing fans, Nelly said: “I have decided to step away from performance for the foreseeable future and pursue some other creative and personal endeavours that I feel would better suit this next phase of my life.

“I have enjoyed my career immensely, and I still love writing music as I have always seen it as a hobby I was lucky enough to make into a career.

“I’ll identify as a songwriter forever.”

Nelly shot to fame in 2000 with her debut album Whoa, Nelly!.

The record was a huge success and spawned the single I’m Like A Bird which went was played on radio stations around the world.

The star is also well known for her song Promiscuous as well as her collaboration with singer James Morrison on Broken Strings.

Another huge hit for Nelly was her chart topping song Maneater.

VAN NUYS — It was a showdown between quake-weary homeowners and the insurance companies they are still battling six months later.

More than 300 people turned out for the confrontation Wednesday night, filling an auditorium at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys for a hearing presided over by state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Senate insurance committee and the Democratic nominee for insurance commissioner in the November election.

Besides disgruntled victims of the Northridge quake, the speakers included representatives of State Farm, the state’s largest carrier with 20% of the homeowners market, and No. 3 Farmers Insurance Group.

Nettie Hoge, head of consumer services for the California Department of Insurance, also participated in the often heated town hall meeting that Torres conducted as an official hearing of the insurance committee.

Hoge told the crowd that state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi had persuaded Woodland Hills-based 20th Century Insurance Co. to restore homeowners coverage to about 14 of its customers whose policies the company recently canceled.

20th Century received so many quake claims that the state insurance department granted the company special permission to get out of the homeowners coverage business. One of the conditions, however, was that the company offer its customers two more annual renewals. Some of its policyholders have complained recently that the company was seizing on technical excuses to refuse immediately to renew their policies.

Many people in the audience brandished signs such as “Boycott 20th Century” and “20th Century, What Did You Do With Our Premiums?”

Torres said 20th Century was invited to send a speaker to the meeting, but declined. However, when Torres asked if anyone from 20th Century was in the audience, two people raised their hands. Rick Dinon, a senior vice president, said the executives were there because they hoped to “correct some misinterpretations of the company’s actions, motives and finances.”

“It hurts,” Dinon said of the homemade signs criticizing the company. “We hope we have the respect of our customers and we most assuredly respect them.

“It hurts a lot to be placed in an adversarial relationship with our customers. It is disappointing we can’t continue to offer them the kind of protection we have in the past.”

When an earthquake hits, “much of the suffering is from the reprehensible conduct of the insurance industry adjusting the earthquake loss,” said George Kehrer, executive director of Community Assistance Recovery, or CARE, a Northridge-based consumer group he said represents more than 5,000 property owners.

“Adjusters swarm into the state like killer bees,” Kehrer said, drawing a standing ovation.

Torres told the group that many of the complaints he has received have come from people who fear their company will abandon them. But he noted that Garamendi is proposing a statewide insurance industry pool as well as supporting proposals for national disaster insurance.

“It’s hard to be patient,” he said. “People in northern California are still dealing with insurance companies from the Loma Prieta quake” in October, 1989.

Bill Gausewitz, of Farmer’s Insurance, said his company had resolved 27,241 quake-related claims, about 90% of those it had received. Of those, 7,877 were dismissed without payment and the others received compensation, he said.

Torres asked Gausewitz if Farmers had received complaints that it refused to pay the true cost of earthquake repairs.

“Not that I know of,” Gausewitz replied, drawing hoots and jeers from the audience.

Hoge said the insurance department has received complaints of low payments by virtually all insurance companies hit by Northridge quake claims.

Torres, whose committee is wrestling with many quake-caused problems, including a growing homeowners coverage crisis, said he arranged the meeting to give angry quake victims a chance to air their grievances.

Disillusioned policyholders have inundated his Los Angeles and Sacramento offices with complaints, he said, ranging from switching adjusters in the middle of the claims process to “low-ball” offers to settle to delays receiving payoff checks. Some accused their insurance carriers of breaking promises or lying to avoid paying claims.

This is the golden age of baseball in Southern California. The Angels heralded its dawn.

In 2002, the Angels won the World Series, the first of six postseason appearances within eight years. The Dodgers had played pretty good ball for more than a century, but they never had done that.

Angel Stadium was the place to be. The rally monkey was all the rage. The team nurtured a wave of young talent to surround Hall of Famer Vladimir Guerrero. In 2009, the final year of that run, the Angels drafted future Hall of Famer Mike Trout. In 2011, for the first and only time, the Angels sold more tickets than the Dodgers.

Neither the Angels nor the Dodgers made the playoffs in 2010, 2011, or 2012. Since then, the Dodgers have made 13 consecutive postseason appearances, with three World Series championships to show for it. The Angels have made one, and they did not win a game.

Never — and this includes the Dodgers’ time in bankruptcy court — have the fates of the two Los Angeles franchises been so disparate. In 2026, the Dodgers could win their third consecutive World Series championship, and the Angels could finish in last place for the third consecutive year.

In a story on the Major League Baseball website, two writers ranked the 30 teams on the basis of how likely each team would be to win this year’s World Series. The Dodgers ranked as most likely. The Angels ranked as least likely.

At a time major league owners would like you to believe market size equals destiny, the team with baseball’s longest postseason drought plays in the second-largest market in North America.

Today, however, we come not to bemoan the bad times but celebrate the good times, for the Angels and Dodgers.

The century is a quarter old. So here are our quarter-century teams for both the Angels and Dodgers, based solely on performances for those teams. In a few places, we included a deserving player at a secondary position, if his primary position was fully stocked. Let us know where we got it right, and where we didn’t.

And, while you’re there, you’ll see the story of our golden age in a nutshell. Of the 22 players on the Dodgers’ first and second teams, 11 were on at least one of the World Series championship teams this decade. Of the 22 players on the Angels’ first and second teams, only four played for the Angels this decade.

One was Shohei Ohtani, the first-team designated hitter for both teams.

*We considered how long someone played for the Dodgers or Angels during this century, as well as how well someone played, but we’re making an exception here for two reasons: one, left field has not been a position of strength and depth for the Dodgers; and, two: Manny Ramirez’s two-month “Mannywood” run after the Dodgers traded for him in 2008 was simply astonishing: He played 53 games and drove in 53 runs, batting .396 with 17 home runs and a 1.232 OPS. In the playoffs, he batted .520 in eight games, hitting four home runs and driving in 10 runs, with a 1.747 OPS. The two-month “Mannywood” run was good for 3.5 WAR — the same WAR Freddie Freeman delivered over the entire 2025 season. (And, yes, in May of the following year, Ramirez was suspended for violating baseball’s drug policy.)

Spring is the season of creation, a time of renewal and new beginnings. In Los Angeles, alas, we were, last spring, a city of cinders. It was a time to mourn.

A hard year followed with floods, ICE, AI, etc., menacing our native optimism. Making matters worse, in December we lost L.A.’s grand visionary vizier, the architect who time and again built us out of civic funk and transformed L.A., inspiring the city he so loved to look good, feel good and do good.

But that is still the case. So many plans Frank Gehry imagined for L.A. still remain. Gehry bequeathed blueprints and models, sketches and concepts, for his large and devoted team of younger architects and next-generation visionaries equipped to fabricate our way out of angst.

Isn’t there supposed to be an Olympics on the way for which the city appears ill-prepared? Spring 2026 is the time to build.

A couple of springs ago, L.A. County dubbed the blocks around Gehry’s masterpiece, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Grand Avenue Cultural District. This includes the rest of the Music Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad and Colburn School. The Grand, Gehry’s resplendent complex across the street from Disney, had recently opened and ground was about to be broken for the Colburn Center, a 1,000-seat concert hall equipped to also serve dance, opera and whatever yet-to-be-invented genres Gehry designed it to enable.

The Colburn Center is well on its way to completion next year. Bits of the building’s pink skin have started to peek out like spring blossoms on the construction site at 2nd and Olive. The Broad has begun an expansion. But after two years, nothing else has been done to make this the cultural district it must become, one unlike anything else in any city.

Four springs ago I toured Grand Avenue with Gehry to gather what he had in mind for an arts district. When Disney Hall opened in 2003, it instantly became an enduring symbol of L.A., overtaking the Hollywood sign in many cases. The Dodgers want to parade joy in winning their second World Series in row last October, where else but in front of Disney? But not in front of all Gehry had in mind.

We will soon have a pair of futuristic new museum buildings to show off this year: the David Geffen Galleries, the controversial Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Peter Zumthor building (I predict it will prove a sensation), and the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (no predictions on that one) next door to the Coliseum. But the fact that each is a 15-minute ride away from the cultural district’s new Metro station only makes the district even more of a center.

A center, indeed. Gehry’s vision included completing the original plans cost-cut out of Disney a quarter-century ago, along with new modifications and much more throughout the area. Some are more costly than others. Enough could be done on Grand Avenue in time for the Olympics to make a difference if we begin this minute.

Since its opening, Disney has been — shamefully — the most poorly lit building of its stature in the world. Gehry had chosen the specific steel for its capacity to reflect light. His idea was to project on the building whatever concert was taking place that night. No sound, just imagery. Belt-tighteners didn’t want to commit the $2 or $3 million or whatever and go through the trouble.

It was spectacularly tested at the hall’s 10th anniversary, but with tacky prerecorded video and crummy amplification. Facilities are now included in the Grand for projectors. It would have been amazing in 2003 and will be amazing now. The Grand has been disappointingly slow to attract the restaurants, bars, cafes and shops it needs to create a scene. The projections could change all that and even create enough of a ruckus to get a reluctant, car-crazed city to make that Grand Avenue block pedestrian.

There is much more for Disney. Gehry wanted to turn BP Hall, where preconcert talks occur, into a small chamber music hall with a suspended balcony. He had plans for reconfiguring the seldom-used small outdoor Keck Amphitheater into an enclosed jazz club for Herbie Hancock and turning the little-used 1st Street entrance into a glass-enclosed bar that would be named the Ernest, in tribute to Ernest Fleischmann, the L.A. Phil executive director who was responsible for building Disney.

Disney was supposed to have a pit for the orchestra, allowing for staging opera and dance. The plans exist. That could be done in a summer for a couple million. Bottom-liners had also nixed Gehry’s original design for a more gracious lobby with a cafe out front, not the gloomy one installed against his will.

The Colburn Center has the potential for being another game changer for the area, a vibrant new hall where we are promised upward of 200 events a year from all walks of musical life, local and international. But Gehry had in mind even more.

He intended to lower the steep and pedestrian unfriendly 2nd Street hill, so that it would be an easy walk from the new Metro station two blocks away, and add two more pedestrian blocks by diverting traffic to the 2nd Street tunnel. This would connect the cultural district with Grand Central Market on one end and the Broad on the other. Then 2nd could itself become a lively street with the stores and restaurants a “district” needs.

A model of architect Frank Gehry’s design of an addition for Colburn School.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

The extraordinary original plans for the Colburn Center included turning the parking lot across 2nd from the hall into a public plaza with a giant video wall and high-end outdoor sound system, for projecting nightly concerts in the hall. Gehry was a devoted outdoor-indoor architect, and he designed for the hall a balcony on which musicians can perform.

That initiative has thus far been blocked by City Hall officials, fearful of the tunnel’s aging infrastructure. Although if that’s the case, I’m not all that eager to be in the tunnel as it currently is when the Big One comes along. This is where L.A. shows its moxie. Upgrade the tunnel. Now! If this were Beijing, New Delhi or Hanoi, it would be a no-brainer.

Gehry next proposed building low-cost artist housing in Grand Park directly across from the Music Center, which would further create a true arts community. There has been talk of renovating the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for three decades and that’s all it’s been. The corporate-esque recent Music Center plaza could use a little excitement, maybe a Phase II.

Arts make a city. The Edinburgh Festival in Scotland was created after World War II to help bring the city back to life. After its fire-bombing, Tokyo founded a bevy of symphony orchestras as a phenomenal experiment in mass antidepression. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony played no small role in lifting the collective mood, preparing Tokyo to create what now feels like the world’s most arresting capital.

Unlike Scotland, unlike England, unlike Germany, unlike France, unlike Italy, unlike Poland, unlike Russia, unlike Finland, unlike the Czech Republic, unlike China, unlike any number of countries, America has no major international arts festival these days. We had one in L.A. in 1984 with the Olympic Arts Festival. The Cultural Olympiad in 2028 has shown no bones. But if we make the cultural district what it could be, there would be no better place anywhere for a major festival.

We have the goods. L.A. artists helped make the modern Salzburg Festival the meaningful model for all others. In 1992, the summer before Esa-Pekka Salonen became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he and the orchestra were invited to shake up clinging Austrian tradition. With the help of director Peter Sellars, they staged Messiaen’s epic opera “Saint François d’Assise,” with pyramids of televisions, resulting in music and monitors upending, in Mozart’s hometown, the role of the modern opera and, so to speak, the sound of music.

Over succeeding decades, both Sellars and Salonen have been Salzburg Festival lodestars. Last summer they were back staging two monodramas, Schoenberg’s “Erwartung” and “Abschied” (the last movement of Mahler’s symphonic song cycle “Das Lied von der Erde”). Conductor and director looked with shocking depth into the “Expectation” of death and gave a “Farewell” to the “Song of the Earth” we all await. I saw it twice and can’t imagine how anyone came away from it quite the same person, not more alive, not more fragile. Art on the stage doesn’t get deeper than “One Morning Turns Into an Eternity,” as Sellars named the production. Salonen, who conducted the production with Vienna Philharmonic, is now about to become the L.A. Phil creative director in the fall and will bring the production to Disney with the L.A. Phil next season. It is thus far the most important opera news of next season in America. All the more reason to build that pit in the hall and get started on much bigger plans.

Salzburg, which manages to come up with around $80 million from here and there, also helped with the question I’ve evaded: Who’s going to pay for all this? I’ve evaded it because it’s the wrong question. Money only started pouring into the building of Disney Hall when people got wind of what it was going to become. Five years ago, Crypto.com paid more than $700 million to change the name of Staples Center. That amount, which created nothing but an advertisement for a product of dubious value to society, is the price of two Walt Disney Concert Halls and probably all of Gehry’s projects put together. It is the amount that could fund nearly nine Salzburg-scale festivals.

If we let ourselves believe that L.A. wealth only cares for mega-crypto advertising, mega-mansions and mega-yachts, then L.A. is over. It isn’t. Do we want to show only that to the world? Downtown, and prominently Crypto.com Arena in L.A. Live, have been designated a center for LA28, as we’re calling the Olympics. That makes a graciously glorifying cultural district, which functions as creation being existential not commercial, just up the road from L.A. Live, L.A. live.

When one morning turns into an eternity, you don’t ask for the bill.

Hall of Fame high school football coach Bob Johnson, who turned El Toro and Mission Viejo into powerhouse high school football programs and became one of the winningest coaches in state history, has died. He was 80. He had been battling Alzheimer’s.

“I feel for the family,” Mission Viejo football coach Chad Johnson (no relation) said Wednesday.

Johnson passed early Wednesday morning,

Johnson won six Southern Section titles coaching at Mission Viejo and three at El Toro while winning 338 games, the second winningest in Orange County history and in the top five in state history, according to the Orange County Register.

He retired after the 2017 season and was inducted into the California High School Football Hall of Fame in 2023.

His two sons, Rob and Bret, were standout high school quarterbacks before enrolling at USC and UCLA, respectively. Rob made it to the NFL. Both became coaches after their playing days were completed. Rob still coaches as an assistant at Mission Viejo.

On a dreary February afternoon in Chinatown, Ben Lovett, pianist and keyboardist of the British folk-rock group Mumford & Sons, was hours away from releasing his band’s sixth album, “Prizefighter.” The LP — co-produced by Aaron Dessner with guests Hozier, Gracie Abrams and Chris Stapleton — rejuvenates a catalog that includes a Grammy for album of the year in 2013. He could have been celebrating, or at least resting up for his upcoming “Saturday Night Live” gig and fall arena tour.

Instead, Lovett was calf-deep in sludgy rain water flooding the streets from a sudden downpour, standing at the roll-gate of a ripped-apart warehouse. “You’ll need this,” Lovett told a Times reporter as he handed out hardhats, walking his construction team through the still-raw hallways, shouting over a cacophony of circular saws.

In a few weeks, this site will be Pacific Electric, a new 750-capacity music venue that Lovett and his venue-developer firm TVG Hospitality have been converting for six years. It’s a small but ambitious entry into a Los Angeles venue landscape that’s recovering from fire and economic woes, yet has also seen several jolts of life recently.

Pacific Electric is a new flagship for the team at TVG, which has become an independent-scene force in the U.S. and U.K. over the last decade. Beyond his band, this project plants Lovett’s flag as an L.A. live music entrepreneur too.

“I’ve never had such a significant moment around a venue launch,” Lovett said in the soon-to-be dressing room at Pacific Electric. “It’s the seventh venue we’ve done, but it has never coincided with such an important creative moment with the band. I have to be very disciplined right now.”

Mumford & Sons led the 2010s folk revival that minted a generation of plaintive, earnest singer-songwriter acts atop the charts. While their genre peers’ fates have varied, Mumford & Sons remained perennial arena and festival headliners, with an ambitious midcareer streak in the studio. As pop culture’s tastes shifted, and his band moved around New York, L.A. and the U.K., Lovett returned to his show-producing roots in 2016 to build the 320-capacity nightclub Omeara in London.

Los Angeles, CA – February 19: Exterior view of the new music venue Pacific Electric, which is under construction in Chinatown and owned by Ben Lovett of the Grammy-winning folk band Mumford & Sons. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“A lot of rooms in America are owned by the promoter, so unless you are working with that promoter, you can’t play that room. I don’t like that. I think there’s something fundamentally broken with that practice,” he said. “I wanted to prove out that idea, but I had to learn everything, like how you get a liquor license. It wasn’t perfect, but the intent was so pure.”

Two years and a couple U.K. venues later, TVG got an unexpected call from the city of Huntsville, Ala., to build the Orion Amphitheater, an 8,000-capacity anchor venue for the massive civic project Apollo Park. The futuristic Grecian agora, which opened in 2022, was beyond anything they’d built before — similar to Red Rocks in Colorado or Forest Hills Stadium in New York. Suddenly, Lovett and TVG were players in the U.S. too.

“When I’m off the road, I drop my kid at school and I go to work. I sit in an office from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” Lovett said. “That’s not common, but there are people I really admire like Pharrell Williams who have a foot in entrepreneurship while also being a creator of songs. By doing a day’s work with TVG, sitting down at the piano can still feel like a hobby.”

Lovett, who lives in L.A., had long wanted something closer to home. The industrial northern pocket of Chinatown housing Pacific Electric is well-known to ravers and foodies — Insomniac’s Naud Street warehouse is close by, and the upscale cocktail bar Apotheke and pan-Asian restaurant Majordomo are around the corner. But besides festivals at Los Angeles State Historic Park, there hadn’t been much of a live music presence in the area (a plan to open an outpost of the NYC venue Baby’s All Right was thwarted by the pandemic).

Pacific Electric will be on the small side for a theater, a more intimate peer of downtown’s Regent or Bellwether. But Lovett’s plowed 20 years of notes from touring into the space — from the serene sandstone-hued dressing rooms with a piano and built-in laundry facilities, to a fully-separated horseshoe bar area to keep fan drink lines moving. There’s no bad sightline in the space, from either the ground floor or upper level balcony, which looks out over a stage wreathed in pink neon and wood cutouts evoking the industrial cityscape outside.

“Keeping the dirt under my fingernails with projects like this, and watching shows as often as I do, you realize how hard and how much creativity and magic there are around shows,” Lovett said. “It’s never a given to have an audience.”

To manage the venue, TVG brought on Stacey Levine, a veteran of the Palladium, Wiltern and Theatre at the Ace Hotel (now the United Theater on Broadway). While her management experience is in larger, historic venues, the chance to build something from scratch with an artist’s insight was enticing.

“People really want to get off their phones and back into independent venues, and this little pocket of downtown is about to pop off,” Levine said. “It’s very cool and close to different areas of L.A. But the venue is also really artist-focused. At 750 capacity, do you often have really nice dressing rooms? Probably not. But this is like welcoming artists into a nice hotel.”

Pacific Electric is independent in the sense that it’s not wholly exclusive for either promoter conglomerate (they plan to work with both Live Nation, AEG and others). Lovett, who cited the San Francisco concert impresario Bill Graham as a model for his company, said, “I love the opportunity to back an artist and be their advocate, and they should be able to work in any room they want to. I’ll die on that hill.”

The music won’t lean especially Mumford-ish. Its first show, with the synthwave group TimeCop1983, is slated for March 20, with a Robyn-themed club night, heavy rockers Militarie Gun and a big comedy slate from the Netflix Is a Joke festival up next.

L.A.’s nightlife — particularly in downtown — is still recovering from the pandemic-era culling of live venues and hospitality. After the malaise that’s ripped through L.A.’s entertainment economy of late, and a year of fires, ICE raids and other withering events in Los Angeles, Pacific Electric will have its work cut out to build its regular audience.

But new venues like South Pasadena’s Sid the Cat Auditorium and Re:Frame in Atwater Village have taken similar big swings in recent months. Lovett sounded hopeful that L.A. has plenty of room for more.

“I operated five venues in the pandemic, and conversations abounded like ‘Is this the death of live experiences?’” Lovett said. “My take was different, which was the one thing that we couldn’t figure out how to fix, was how to spend time together. Our greatest void was human interaction. We’re always going to trend towards congregation. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t do this.”

From Hollywood actors to Olympic athletes and politicians, California’s newest Hall of Fame class runs the gamut in talent and achievements.

Academy Award-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis and former governor/action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, Olympic champions Janet Evans and Carl Lewis, authors Riane Eisler and Terry McMillan, chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, groundbreaking ensemble Mariachi Reyne de Los Ángeles and former state Democratic leader John L. Burton all earned a spot into the assembly of distinct Californians, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Tuesday.

This class, the 19th in state history, will be formally enshrined during a ceremony at the California Museum in Sacramento on March 19 as a “celebration of their contributions to civic life, creativity, and social progress,” according to Newsom’s office.

The inductees “have reshaped our culture and our communities. Resilient and innovative, these leaders and luminaries represent the best of the California spirit,” Newsom said in a statement.

To be inducted, candidates must have lived in California for at least five years and “have made achievements benefiting the state, nation and world,” according to the California Hall of Fame website. To date, 166 Californians have been selected by three governors since 2006.

Schwarzenegger, 78, served as the state’s 38th governor and last Republican head of state from 2003 to 2011. His renaissance man biography includes a career as a body builder, highlighted by his Mr. Universe titles, action film success, political stardom and even tabloid-fodder infidelity.

Curtis, 67, a Santa Monica native, is among Hollywood’s elite and teamed with Schwarzenegger in the action blockbuster “True Lies” in 1994. Her acting career dates to 1977, and she earned a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in 2023 for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

Evans, 54, is a four-time Olympic gold medal swimmer and Fullerton native who attended Placentia El Dorado High School, Stanford University and USC. She serves as chief athletic officer for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

Lewis, 64, is considered by many one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century. The track star won 10 medals, nine of them gold, in four Olympics.

Eisler, 88, and McMillan, 74, added multiple bestsellers to this Hall of Fame class.

Eisler’s critically acclaimed “The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future” examines roughly 20,000 years of partnership between men and women and male domination over the last 5,000 years. The futurist, cultural historian and Holocaust survivor who has degrees in sociology and law from UCLA said she was informed of the honor last year by Jennifer Siebel Newsom and recently was honored by the Austrian government with its Cross of Honour 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 firmly believe that a new paradigm, a new way of looking at our world and our place in it, is crucial.”

McMillan has written a series of smash hits, including a couple that became major studio films in the ‘90s, “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got her Groove Back,” centered on Black women’s voices.

Matsuhisa, 76, know for his iconic Japanese restaurant Nobu, which has six locations in California, owns businesses across five continents.

Mariachi Reyna de Los Ángeles, founded in South El Monte, rewrote the rules of music, becoming the first all-woman mariachi ensemble that has entertained for more than three decades.

Burton, the former chair of the California Democratic Party who died last year at 92, boasted a political career that included time in the California State Assembly and Senate and the U.S. House.

“This year’s class embodies the very best of California — creativity, resilience and a spirit of community,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement. “These honorees remind us that innovation and courage flourish when people are lifted up by those around them.”