Los Angeles: Californians banished their Governor Gray Davis just 11 months into his second term and elected action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger to replace him on October 7 – a Hollywood ending to one of the most extraordinary political melodramas in the United States' history.

Voters traded a career Democratic politician, who became one of the state's most despised chief executives for a moderate Republican megastar, who had never before run for office. Davis became the first California Governor pried from office and only the second nationwide to be recalled.

Schwarzenegger prevailed despite a flurry of negative publicity in the campaign's final days, surviving allegations that he had groped women and accusations that as a young man he expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The 56-year-old Austrian immigrant – husband of television journalist Maria Shriver – finds himself in charge of the United States' most populated state with an economy surpassed only by those of several countries.

Agencies