TORONTO – A mix of Canadian talent from film, music, sport and even the law were ushered into Canada’s Walk of Fame on Saturday.
Olympic hockey star Hayley Wickenheiser, actors Rachel McAdams and Ryan Reynolds, and former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour received stars, alongside Canadian-American innovators The Band and blind blues-rock guitarist Jeff Healey, who died in 2008.
The fact that those who were honoured are from so many different fields made the moment all the more special, said Wickenheiser.
“I feel very proud to be Canadian, to be included on a list of talent that just crosses the spectrum of all sorts of different talent in this country. It’s such a unique honour,” Wickenheiser said as her star was unveiled under cloudy skies in downtown Toronto.
READ MORE: Full coverage of Canada’s Walk of Fame
For Reynolds, being honoured with such a diverse group was something he could never have imagined as a teen.
“If you could ask me when I was 16 years old that I’d be standing here doing this right now, I’d just be lucky and happy that I lived this long, let alone to have this honour, so I’m excited,” Reynolds said, adding that it was “unreal” to share the stage with Arbour.
“She kneecapped Slobo,” he said, a reference to her work to bring Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to justice on war crime charges in 1999.
Arbour is no stranger to publicity but said it was a novel experience to be in the spotlight of the Walk of Fame.
“Coming from the legal profession, the judiciary, where we don’t think of ourselves as celebrities, even when our work is done very much in public, to get this kind of visibility for our work is really very special,” she said.
“I really hope it will encourage a lot of young Canadians to look at the law as not a boring profession but a very exciting one.”
Canada’s Walk of Fame celebrates Canadians who have achieved excellence in a variety of areas, ranging from music, television and film to sports, science and literature.
Honourees’ names are engraved on stars, which are then displayed on the sidewalks of King Street West and Simcoe Street in the downtown Entertainment District.
This year’s list of inductees was selected from more than 50,000 nominations.
McAdams said she was surprised when she received the news.
“To be recognized by your own country like this and to be put on this illustrious list of people that have come before is, I mean, is sort of beyond words for me,” she said.
After a red carpet ceremony, the inductees were to be celebrated at an awards show scheduled to air on Global and Slice on Dec. 19.
Reynolds and McAdams have both achieved success in Hollywood but have strong Canadian roots.
McAdams was born in London, Ont., raised in nearby St. Thomas and currently lives in Toronto. She studied theatre at York University before her breakout roles in 2004’s Mean Girls and The Notebook. She went on to play Irene Adler in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and appear in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
In addition to Mean Girls, McAdams has made several movies in Toronto including The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Vow. She is currently in the city shooting Spotlight.
Reynolds, 37, hails from Vancouver and most recently played a distraught father in Atom Egoyan’s made-in-Ontario kidnapping thriller The Captive. He’s also known for starring roles in Green Lantern and Buried.
Reynolds was first announced as an inductee to Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2011 but was unable to attend to ceremony.
Wickenheiser has been to the Winter Olympics for Canada five times, winning four gold medals and one silver.
The storied career of Montreal-born Arbour has taken her around the globe. In 1996, she was appointed by the UN Security Council as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and made history with the indictment of Milosevic, a sitting head of state.
She sat on the Supreme Court of Canada from 1999 and 2004. She then joined the United Nations, where she served as High Commissioner for Human Rights until 2008.
Healey is a Toronto-born jazz and blues-rock singer and guitarist who lost his sight as an infant to a rare eye cancer.
– with files by Global News
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