Anna Murdoch Mann, the writer, philanthropist, and ex-wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, passed away on Feb. 17 at age 81. She and Rupert got married in 1967, after his divorce from his first wife, Patricia Booker. They stayed married for 31 years.
GettyShe was born Anna Torv in Scotland in 1944, the first of four children. When she was nine years old, the family moved to Sydney, Australia. After her mother, Sylvia, left, she helped raise her three younger siblings. Despite this, she never harboured any ill will towards her mother.
“She didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Murdoch Mann told the Australian Women’s Weekly in 2001. “I think she was rather a lost soul. I think she always thought the grass was greener somewhere else, and, of course, it wasn’t.”
Anna Murdoch Mann Wasn’t a Fan of Rupert’s Succession Plan
Murdoch Mann was a reporter for Sydney’s Daily Mirror and Daily Telegraph, which is how she met Rupert, the paper’s publisher. The couple had three children, James, Elisabeth, and Lachlan.
GettyWhile the drama involving who would succeed Rupert and take over Fox Corp. was finally decided in 2025, it also played out on TV in the fictional series “Succession.” Murdoch Mann always had strong opinions about which child should succeed him.
“Actually I’d like none of them to,” she said. “I think they’re all so good that they could do whatever they wanted really. But I think there’s going to be a lot of heartbreak and hardship with this [succession]. There’s been such a lot of pressure that they needn’t have had their age.”
Murdoch Mann wrote her first book, “In Her Own Image,” at age 40. She followed those up with “Family Business,” “Coming to Terms: A Novel,” and “Over Granite Through Heather.”
Murdoch Mann was considered by many to be essential to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation expansion. “She played a foundational role in the history of the company,” Paddy Manning, author of “The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch,” said.
Tragic Mistaken Identity: The Kidnapping That Shook Anna Murdoch Mann
In 1969, while the Murdochs were living in London, a terrible case of mistaken identity occurred. Muriel McKay, the wife of News Limited executive Alick McKay, was kidnapped. She had been driving the Murdochs’ car while Anna and Elisabeth were in Australia.
Her abductors assumed that Muriel was Anna and demanded a ransom of a million pounds. When they realized they had kidnapped the wrong person, they killed her. Murdoch Mann described that period of time as feeling like “another lifetime.” Soon after, the family moved to the U.S.
A year after her divorce from Rupert, she married Wall Street financier William Mann. The couple was married until he died in 2017. She then married Ashton dePeyster in 2019. Murdoch Mann is survived by dePeyster, her children, 10 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
