Scottish-Australian socialite, journalist, novelist and news figure as the second wife of billionaire media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. They were married from 1967 to 1999 and she raised their three children, all of whom became business executives.
One of four kids of an Estonian refugee engineer and his Scottish wife, she was brought up in Kirkintilloch until she was nine, when the family emigrated to Australia. She followed a career in journalism which led her to interview, and later marry, Keith Rupert Murdoch, the media magnate.
After 31 years of marriage, they separated in May 1998. As a committed Catholic, her petition for divorce, asking for an accounting of the couple’s assets, filed in Los Angeles in July 1998, was a shock. The Murdochs were known for being intensely private, straitlaced and family-oriented. He was then estimated to be worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes and their divorce settlement was expected to be one of the biggest in history.
Her first novel, In Her Own Image (1986), is about two sisters who fall in love with the same man on a sheep station close to the Murrumbidgee River. Her second novel, Family Business (1988), is the story about family infighting over control of a media dynasty. The Murdochs and their three kids then owned 30% of the company with enough voting shares for Rupert to run the place like a fiefdom. Anna sat on the board and their oldest son, Lachlan, was in line to take over. He later ran the Australian operations and became a media executive, Elisabeth became general manager of a British satellite-TV branch, and James was deputy publisher of the New York Post.
“It’s a personal issue between them,” said James, “It is not a business issue that we’re going to start fighting over.” A former butler wrote in the English magazine “Punch” that Murdoch is a man who loves his work and has little time and interest in the cultural events his wife enjoyed or in domestic tranquility. Perhaps Anna wanted more of a marriage.
When Anna and Rupert Murdoch divorced in 1999, she reportedly received $1.7 billion (including $110 million in cash) from the settlement. She remarried six months later, to William Mann, a financier. He died in 2017. She remarried to Ashton dePeyster in April 2019.
Link to Wikipedia biography