Wall Street Journal<\/a> 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>\nMcKnight said despite Lachlan securing the sole voting rights of the Murdoch family in the court proceedings in Nevada last year, Murdoch-Mann\u2019s death served as another reminder that News Corporation has always been a family company, as well as a public company.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe dynamics of the family have always played into what is nominally a company controlled by shareholders, and will continue to operate like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Murdoch siblings\u2019 protracted battle for control of News Corporation was the dynamic that inspired the hit HBO show Succession.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s children.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the phone hacking scandal broke [in 2011] she was there to make sure that Rupert didn\u2019t fire James who was the chief executive of News International,\u201d said Manning.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe flew to London to the war room that the Murdochs had as they were trying to work out how to respond to the crisis \u2026 there was even speculation that he might go to jail.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt that point I don\u2019t 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\u2019t sack him \u2026 she was still trying to unify the family at that point when they were under a hell of a lot of pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Murdoch-Mann was born Anna Torv in Glasgow, Scotland. Her father \u2013 Jakob Torv, an Estonian merchant seaman \u2013 and her Scottish mother migrated to Australia in 1944 when she was nine years old, settling in Sydney\u2019s western suburbs. Biographers of Murdoch suggest 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 cadet journalist at the Mirror that she first met and interviewed her future husband, who had just bought the paper.<\/p>\n
A fellow cadet at the time was the Australian writer and second wife of Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, Blanche d\u2019Alpuget, and the two young women developed a strong friendship.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was lively, she was full of fun, she was very left wing, she was very bright, and she was both strategic and tactical,\u201d d\u2019Alpuget told the Guardian.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe got herself a cadetship, which wasn\u2019t easy in those days, because basically everything was nepotism.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then she had the chutzpah to ask for an interview with Rupert, her boss, which was a brilliant move \u2013 he was unattached at the time \u2013 and that was a very smart move on her part too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the young cadet\u2019s strategic prowess, d\u2019Alpuget says Anna\u2019s marriage to Rupert was very much a love match.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was absolutely mad about him, she was just head over heels in love. So it\u2019s hard to know how much the head came into that, but it was certainly the heart as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the engagement broke the hearts of many young men in the newsroom at the time, d\u2019Alpuget recalls.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were absolutely mad about it because she was so good looking. She had lovely, lovely, long legs, and she dressed well. She wasn\u2019t natural blonde, she became a blonde which suited her very well because she these genuine green eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Murdoch-Mann rarely spoke of her difficult childhood. D\u2019Alpuget said she gathered that after Anna\u2019s parents\u2019 divorce, her mother was no longer on the scene, hence the oldest sibling\u2019s childrearing responsibilities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething she wanted to learn from me \u2013 something that she didn\u2019t grow up with \u2013 was correct table manners \u2026 which spoon and which fork and whatnot \u2026 she had that immigrants\u2019 desire to fit in and learn about the country she was in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Murdoch-Mann did not retire from writing altogether when she married and had children.<\/p>\n
She authored three novels \u2013 In Her Own Image (1985), Family Business (1988), and Coming to Terms (1992).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd sure enough it did.\u201d<\/p>\nAnna Murdoch-Mann with her son James, in 1985.<\/span> Photograph: Michael Brennan\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nA 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
Yet d\u2019Alpuget recalls no particular religiosity in her young friend from their cadetship days.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that became stronger much later \u2026 after that terrible thing in London,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that was maybe what brought her very close to prayer and humility and the realisation of the fragility of life,\u201d d\u2019Alpuget said.<\/p>\n
Murdoch-Mann held leadership roles at Children\u2019s Hospital Los Angeles and 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
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 \u2013 an era during which her aunt was the most powerful woman inside the real-life Murdoch empire.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#Tactical #influential #mad #Rupert #Anna #MurdochMann #remembered #death #aged #news<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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