{"id":310336,"date":"2026-02-21T19:42:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T19:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/310336\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T19:42:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T19:42:07","slug":"anna-murdoch-mann-author-and-ex-wife-of-rupert-murdoch-dies-aged-81-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/310336\/","title":{"rendered":"Anna Murdoch-Mann, author and ex-wife of Rupert Murdoch, dies aged 81 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The author and philanthropist Anna Murdoch-Mann, the ex-wife of the Australian<\/a> media tycoon Rupert Murdoch<\/a>, died at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday. She was 81.<\/p>\n

Murdoch-Mann\u2019s death was reported Friday by the New York Post, one of her ex-husband\u2019s media properties.<\/p>\n

During 31 years of marriage, Murdoch-Mann was reported to have played an active role in the building of Murdoch\u2019s media empire, News Corp. She and Murdoch also had three children: Elisabeth, James and Lachlan, who is now the chair of News Corp.<\/p>\n

The pair split in 1998 after Rupert Murdoch\u2019s affair with Wendi Deng, who became his third wife. Murdoch-Mann said she was forced off the News Corp board in the wake of that split.<\/p>\n

Their divorce was finalised in 1999, with Murdoch-Mann receiving a reported $1.7bn from the settlement. Just a few weeks after the finalisation of the divorce, Rupert Murdoch married Deng on his yacht in New York harbour.<\/p>\n

In October 1999, Murdoch-Mann married the Wall Street financier William Mann. They were married until Mann\u2019s death in 2017. She then married Ashton dePeyster in 2019.<\/p>\n

Murdoch-Mann granted a tell-all interview with Australian Women\u2019s Weekly in 2001, opening up about the difficulties in her marriage to Murdoch. She said he was \u201cextremely hard, ruthless, and determined that he was going to go through with this no matter what I wanted or what I was trying to do to save the marriage\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had no interest in that whatsoever,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

In the same interview, Murdoch-Mann expressed fear at the idea of her children competing to be their father\u2019s successor. She included her stepdaughter, Prudence, the daughter from Murdoch\u2019s first marriage to model Patricia Booker, as one of those children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think they\u2019re all so good that they could do whatever they wanted,\u201d she said. \u201cBut I think there\u2019s going to be a lot of heartbreak and hardship with this [fight for succession].\u201d<\/p>\n

That dynamic inspired the hit HBO show Succession.<\/p>\n

In September 2025, it was announced that Lachlan Murdoch \u2013 Rupert Murdoch and Anna Murdoch-Mann\u2019s eldest son \u2013 would secure control of the sprawling media empire<\/a> that his father created, which includes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the Times in the UK. His three oldest siblings were left to receive an estimated $1.1bn each for their shares in the business.<\/p>\n

Murdoch-Mann was born Anna Torv in Glasgow, Scotland<\/a>. Her father, Jakob Torv, an Estonian merchant seaman, and her Scottish mother, migrated to Australia in 1944 when she was nine years old, settling in Sydney\u2019s western suburbs. It has been reported that the young Anna had a difficult childhood after her parents split, raising her younger siblings.<\/p>\n

But she rose to become a reporter at the Sydney Daily Mirror and later the Sydney Daily Telegraph. It was while working as an 18-year-old journalist at the Mirror that she first met and interviewed her future husband, who had just bought the paper.<\/p>\n

She also authored three novels \u2013 In Her Own Image (1985), Family Business (1988), and Coming to Terms (1992) \u2013 and became involved in philanthropic causes benefiting children.<\/p>\n

A devout Catholic, she often cited her faith as her anchor during the public unravelling of her marriage and her subsequent exit from the News Corp board.<\/p>\n

She held leadership roles at Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles, Haiti\u2019s Hospital Albert Schweitzer and in 1998 was made a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II.<\/p>\n

Murdoch-Mann was also the aunt of multi-ward winning Australian actress Anna Torv. In a piece of life imitating art, the younger Anna Torv starred in the hit Australian series The Newsreader, portraying a high-profile news anchor navigating the cutthroat corporate media world of the 1980s \u2013 an era during which her aunt was the most powerful woman inside the real-life Murdoch empire. \u2013 Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The author and philanthropist Anna Murdoch-Mann, the ex-wife of the Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, died at her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310337,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60,9358],"class_list":["post-310336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-rupert-murdoch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310336\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}