SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Maria Shriver was sidelined as a network TV journalist when her movie star husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, suddenly decided to jump into politics -- the business of her family.

Being first lady of California, a job that involves more pomp than policy, was not an easy fit for the ambitious feminist who had worked hard to carve out an identity separate from her Democratic family dynasty as a Kennedy and a Shriver.

The new role was not one she necessarily coveted, but she made it her own.

"You've got to be kidding! That's not me! I didn't grow up wanting to be first lady of anything!" she wrote in her 2008 book "Just Who Will You Be?" about her sentiments after her husband was elected in the 2003 recall election that ousted the incumbent Democratic governor. "But there I found myself, and I didn't have a clue what to do."

What she did not do was seek to fit in in Sacramento, a company town where politics and state government are the core business. She and the couple's four children, now ages 13, 17, 19 and 21, never made the move to the state capital, instead jetting in for special events while Schwarzenegger flew home most nights on his private plane.

In a joint statement Monday night announcing their separation after 25 years of marriage, Shriver and Schwarzenegger said they will keep raising their four children together, calling them "the light and the centre of both of our lives."

Still, Shriver was never far in spirit from the governor's expansive Capitol office, where an enormous Andy Warhol portrait of her hung over proceedings, and she was said to weigh in frequently with opinions on policy.

She was instrumental in revamping her husband's administration after Schwarzenegger promoted a failed slate of ballot initiatives in a 2005 special election. Shriver helped persuade him to bring on a Democratic chief of staff and restore his image as a centrist Republican.

"It appeared that she was the governor's most important political and policy adviser," said Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California's Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics and a Republican whom Schwarzenegger temporarily appointed to the Fair Political Practices Commission last year.

"He might not have gotten to be governor without her, and he certainly wouldn't have resurrected his governorship without her," Schnur said.

During the seven years Schwarzenegger held office, Shriver took on various official projects as first lady, including revamping the California Museum in downtown Sacramento, which is now called the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. Shriver noticed "the glaring absence of any type of commemoration of California women and the role they have played in the state's history," according to the museum's website.

She and Schwarzenegger also launched the California Hall of Fame, honouring famous Californians from all walks of life during an annual red carpet ceremony at the museum.

The first lady's women's conference grew to a massive, glamorous event called the Women's Conference, where thousands of well-heeled women lunched in Long Beach while listening to the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Bono, Gloria Steinem, the Dalai Lama and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

Shriver's office started WE Connect to link poor California families to programs and services from state and federal governments that many didn't know about. It continues after her departure, now operated by the non-profit California Endowment.

Those projects evolved after a rocky start, in which Shriver acknowledged she had grave concerns about exposing her own family to a political life that she equated with separation and loss. She is a child of the Kennedy Democratic dynasty -- the daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who was the sister of President John F. Kennedy, and of Sargent Shriver, the first head of the Peace Corps and the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1972.

"I'd learned early on that political life was about constant travel and being surrounded by 50 people in the house, and either you lose or you get assassinated," she told Winfrey.

By the time her husband surprised her with the news that he wanted to run for governor in the state's historic recall of former Gov. Gray Davis, Shriver had spent 25 years in the news business and won a Peabody award for her coverage of women in Minnesota's welfare reform program.

After working at stations in Philadelphia and Baltimore, Shriver joined CBS News in Los Angeles in 1983, and jumped to NBC in 1986, where she held positions that included news magazine reporter and anchor. She served as a correspondent covering the Democratic and Republican conventions and later hosted and reported for "Dateline NBC."

Then, she said in "Just Who Will You Be?", her idea of herself went up in smoke.

"One day out of nowhere, my movie-star husband announced he was running for governor of California. Just 60 days later, he was elected. And because NBC News was worried there might be a perceived conflict of interest between my news job and his political job, I was asked to resign. Just like that my career was gone, and with it the person I'd been for 25 years."

Despite her background as a reporter, Shriver's staff always kept her at arms-length from the California political press corps, instead favouring interviews with Winfrey and Entertainment Tonight. She also produced a documentary about Alzheimer's disease, from which her father suffered until his death in January. Toward the end of her husband's administration, she collaborated with Time magazine on a project about the status of women.

Her influence and concern for women's equality left a stamp on Schwarzenegger's administration. By the time he left office in January of this year, it was stacked with women, some of them Democrats, including chief-of-staff Susan Kennedy and finance director Ana Matosantos.

She was often the subject of Schwarzenegger's wisecracks, though, as he joked about being in the doghouse with his wife during heated political campaigns such as the 2008 presidential race, when Shriver endorsed Democrat Barack Obama while Schwarzenegger backed longtime friend Sen. John McCain, a Republican.

After Obama's victory, Schwarzenegger joked, "I can get back into the bedroom." He added that his wife had been gloating and running around the house with a "life-size cutout of Obama," saying "We won."

Despite her reservations, Shriver was essential to his election as governor in the historic 2003 recall, lending him credibility with women voters after the Los Angeles Times reported allegations from 15 women that Schwarzenegger had groped and verbally harassed them during encounters dating to the early 1970s and as recently as 2000. Schwarzenegger apologized for his bad behaviour but never fully addressed the claims.

During a recent interview with Details magazine, the couple's oldest son Patrick, 17, said the transition from being first family of California had been difficult, particularly when the state-paid bodyguards who had become like family left when Schwarzenegger's term in office ended last January.

Of his father, he said, "He's home all the time now."

Patrick, who has his own clothing line and a new deal as a model, shied away from a future in politics.

"My mom always talks about how hard it was to grow up in a political family," he said. "It's always split up, and just -- I want to have fun in life. No, politics isn't on the list."