Tactical, influential and mad about Rupert: Anna Murdoch-Mann remembered after her death aged 81 | US news

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

Murdoch-Mann’s death was reported Friday by the New York Post, one of her ex-husband’s media properties.

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

The pair split in 1998 after Rupert Murdoch’s 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.

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 the New York harbour.

Murdoch-Mann married the Wall Street financier William Mann the same year. They were married until Mann’s death in 2017. She then married property developer Ashton dePeyster in 2019.

Her death marks the end of a life that began in the working-class suburbs of Sydney, but biographers of the Murdoch dynasty say her influence on the global media landscape, and in the bitter succession battle that engulfed her children, cannot be underestimated.

“She played a foundational role in the history of the company,” said Paddy Manning, author of The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch.

“She had a huge influence on the success of the company as it went through its most spectacular growth phase in the 80s and 90s.

“In the early 1990s she was seen as a potential successor to Rupert himself, just as Janet Holmes à Court took over Bell from [Robert] when he died.”

Murdoch-Mann granted a tell-all interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly in 2001, opening up about the difficulties in her marriage to Rupert. She said he was “extremely 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.

“He had no interest in that whatsoever.”

In the same interview, Murdoch-Mann also expressed fear at the idea of her children competing to be their father’s successor, including her stepdaughter, Prudence, the daughter from Murdoch’s first marriage to model Patricia Booker.

“I think they’re all so good that they could do whatever they wanted,” she said. “But I think there’s going to be a lot of heartbreak and hardship with this [fight for succession].”

Manning said the divorce defined the Murdoch family’s future, and set in progress an early conflict of loyalty in one of his children.

“Rupert didn’t do the courtesy of telling Anna she was off the board … she found out when she read the notice of the general meeting,” he said.

“She gave this very powerful farewell speech to the board of News Corporation, and walked out escorted by Lachlan. It was a key moment.

“She could have broken the company in half and and didn’t. She played her cards so that her kids, and only her kids, as well as Prudence, would be the only ones who could ever succeed Rupert.”

David McKnight, author of Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power, agrees. The divorce also forced Murdoch’s hand in firming up his will.

“By renouncing some of her wealth, some of her entitlement under Rupert’s will, Anna secured her children’s futures by making sure any future children he might have would not be treated equally,” McKnight said.

“And as it turned out, he had two more, with Wendi Deng.”

Manning says at about the same time, Murdoch-Mann was pressuring Murdoch to retire and hand the empire over to their kids.

“He didn’t want to. Nobody realised Rupert had another 25 years’ work in him.”

In September 2025, it was announced that Lachlan Murdoch – Rupert Murdoch and Anna Murdoch-Mann’s eldest son – would secure control of the sprawling media empire 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.

McKnight said despite Lachlan securing the sole voting rights of the Murdoch family in the court proceedings in Nevada last year, Murdoch-Mann’s death served as another reminder that News Corporation has always been a family company, as well as a public company.

“The dynamics of the family have always played into what is nominally a company controlled by shareholders, and will continue to operate like that.”

The Murdoch siblings’ protracted battle for control of News Corporation was the dynamic that inspired the hit HBO show Succession.

But unlike the fictional second wife of Logan Roy, Lady Caroline Collingwood (played by Harriet Walter), mother of the three sparring children, Kendall, Roman and Shiv, the real Mrs Murdoch #2 attempted to play a unifying role in the future of the couple’s children.

“When the phone hacking scandal broke [in 2011] she was there to make sure that Rupert didn’t fire James who was the chief executive of News International,” said Manning.

“She flew to London to the war room that the Murdochs had as they were trying to work out how to respond to the crisis … there was even speculation that he might go to jail.

“At that point I don’t think she was necessarily weighing in to ensure that James would remain the successor over Lachlan, but she certainly was weighing in to make sure that Rupert and Elisabeth didn’t sack him … she was still trying to unify the family at that point when they were under a hell of a lot of pressure.”

Murdoch-Mann was born Anna Torv in Glasgow, Scotland. 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’s western suburbs. Biographers of Murdoch suggest the young Anna had a difficult childhood after her parents split, raising her younger siblings.

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 cadet journalist at the Mirror that she first met and interviewed her future husband, who had just bought the paper.

A fellow cadet at the time was the Australian writer and second wife of Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, Blanche d’Alpuget, and the two young women developed a strong friendship.

“She was lively, she was full of fun, she was very left wing, she was very bright, and she was both strategic and tactical,” d’Alpuget told the Guardian.

“She got herself a cadetship, which wasn’t easy in those days, because basically everything was nepotism.

“And then she had the chutzpah to ask for an interview with Rupert, her boss, which was a brilliant move – he was unattached at the time – and that was a very smart move on her part too.”

Despite the young cadet’s strategic prowess, d’Alpuget says Anna’s marriage to Rupert was very much a love match.

“She was absolutely mad about him, she was just head over heels in love. So it’s hard to know how much the head came into that, but it was certainly the heart as well.”

And the engagement broke the hearts of many young men in the newsroom at the time, d’Alpuget recalls.

“They were absolutely mad about it because she was so good looking. She had lovely, lovely, long legs, and she dressed well. She wasn’t natural blonde, she became a blonde which suited her very well because she these genuine green eyes.”

Murdoch-Mann rarely spoke of her difficult childhood. D’Alpuget said she gathered that after Anna’s parents’ divorce, her mother was no longer on the scene, hence the oldest sibling’s childrearing responsibilities.

“The thing that really impressed me about Anna was that despite her background, she had a certain European reserve and sophistication and elegance from a young age.

“Something she wanted to learn from me – something that she didn’t grow up with – was correct table manners … which spoon and which fork and whatnot … she had that immigrants’ desire to fit in and learn about the country she was in.”

Murdoch-Mann did not retire from writing altogether when she married and had children.

She authored three novels – In Her Own Image (1985), Family Business (1988), and Coming to Terms (1992).

Family Business, said Manning, was written while she was still at the height of her power as the matriarch of News Corp. A work about a fictional family-run global media empire, it was with prophetic irony that the family she invented would tear itself apart over the issue of succession in the novel.

“And sure enough it did.”

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.

Yet d’Alpuget recalls no particular religiosity in her young friend from their cadetship days.

“I think that became stronger much later … after that terrible thing in London,” she said, referring to the kidnapping and murder of the wife of the acting chair of News of the World in 1969. In a case of mistaken identity, the kidnappers had intended Murdoch-Mann to be their victim.

“I think that was maybe what brought her very close to prayer and humility and the realisation of the fragility of life,” d’Alpuget said.

Murdoch-Mann held leadership roles at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Haiti’s Hospital Albert Schweitzer, and in 1998 was made a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II.

She 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 – an era during which her aunt was the most powerful woman inside the real-life Murdoch empire.