Anna de Peyster, an author and philanthropist who was Rupert Murdoch’s second wife and the mother of their children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, has died. She was 81.
She died Tuesday at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, after a long illness, the New York Post reported.
She and Murdoch were married from 1967 until their divorce in 1999, and she was a member of the News Corp. board from 1990-98.
Anna Maria Torv was born in 1944 in Glasgow, Scotland. She and her family moved to Australia in the mid-1950s. She worked as a clerk at the Daily Mirror in Sydney and eventually became a reporter, and after interviewing Murdoch, then the newspaper’s publisher, they married soon after he divorced Patricia Booker.
Elisabeth (co-founder of Sister Pictures) was born in 1968 in Sydney, followed by Laclan (now chief executive of Fox Corp.) in 1971 and James in 1972 in London.
De Peyster earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Fordham and her master’s in literature and mythology at NYU and as Anna Murdoch published three novels, 1985’s In Her Own Image, 1988’s Family Business and 1991’s Coming to Terms.
Mere months after her divorce from Murdoch became official, she married businessman William Mann, and they were together until his death in 2017. Two years later, she wed Ashton de Peyster, a real-estate developer in Florida, and he survives her, as do 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Her philanthropic efforts included service to Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Institute in Los Angeles and to the Albert Schweitzer hospital for children in Haiti.
Murdoch also was married to Wendi Deng from 1999-2013, to Jerry Hall (ex-wife of Mick Jagger) from 2016-22 and since June 2024 to Elena Zhukova.
