Anna Murdoch Mann, the media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s former wife, whose father was Estonian, has died aged 81; she was the mother of three of Murdoch’s children – Elisabeth, James and Lachlan Murdoch, the latter now chairman of Fox and News Corp.
Murdoch Mann, who was married to Rupert Murdoch for 31 years and played an influential role on the board of his publishing empire, News Corp, died on 17 February at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, surrounded by her family.
Murdoch-Mann, born Anna Torv in Glasgow, Scotland, was a daughter of an Estonian tailor Jakob Tõrv, who hailed from the Tõrvanõmme farm in Tõstamaa borough in Estonia’s Pärnu County.
Before World War II, Jakob worked as a village tailor and later in Pärnu, making trousers. In Pärnu, he boarded a ship to Scotland, where he continued to work in a tailor’s shop in Glasgow and anglicised his name to Jacob Torv. Soon, he fell in love and married the Scottish shop owner’s daughter; their daughter Anna Maria Torv was born in Glasgow in 1944.
Jakob’s marriage fell apart when Anna was still a child; the divorce left Anna and her siblings (she has two brothers and a sister) with the father, who moved to Australia with the children in 1954 and opened his own drycleaning business there.
From Australia to London to New York
Anna finished high school in Australia; as her father did not have enough money to send her daughter to university, she took a job as a reporter for The Daily Mirror, a Sydney-based afternoon paper. While working at the paper, Anna met its owner, Rupert Murdoch, who had inherited the Adelaide-based tabloid The News from his late dad, Sir Keith Murdoch, in 1952, and who would build the global media empire in the next 70 years.
Anna and Rupert got married in 1967; their first child, Elisabeth, was born in 1968. Soon, Australia became too small for the ambitious newspaper magnate and in 1969, the family moved to the UK, where Rupert took over The News of the World, followed closely by The Sun. Their sons Lachlan (1971) and James (1972) were born in London.
The family would move on to New York City in the mid-1970s, where over the years their empire expanded by acquiring numerous assets, including the Twentieth Century Fox film studio and The Wall Street Journal.
Anna and Rupert split in 1998 after Rupert’s affair with Wendi Deng, who became his third wife. Their divorce was finalised in 1999, with Murdoch Mann reportedly receiving $1.7 billion in the settlement. Just a few weeks later, Rupert Murdoch married Deng on his yacht in New York Harbour.
Papal recognition
Murdoch Mann married the Wall Street financier William Mann the same year. They remained married until Mann’s death in 2017. In 2019, she married the property developer Ashton dePeyster, who survives her, along with ten grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
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 $1.1 billion each for their shares in the business.
Murdoch-Mann served on the boards of several children’s hospitals, including in Los Angeles and Haiti.
In 1998, she was made a Dame of the Order of St Gregory by Pope John Paul II.
