The author and philanthropist Anna Murdoch-Mann, the ex-wife of the Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, died at her home in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday. She was 81.

Murdoch-Mann’s death was reported Friday by the New York Post, one of her ex-husband’s media properties.

During 31 years of marriage, Murdoch-Mann was reported to have played an active role in the building of Murdoch’s media empire, News Corp. She and Murdoch also had three children: Elisabeth, James and Lachlan, who is now the chair of News Corp.

The pair split in 1998 after Rupert Murdoch’s affair with Wendi Deng, who became his third wife. Murdoch-Mann said she was forced off the News Corp board in the wake of that split.

Their divorce was finalized in 1999, with Murdoch-Mann receiving a reported $1.7bn from the settlement. Just a few weeks after the finalization of the divorce, Rupert Murdoch married Deng on his yacht in the New York harbor.

In October 1999, Murdoch-Mann married the Wall Street financier William Mann. They were married until Mann’s death in 2017. She then married Ashton dePeyster in 2019.

Murdoch-Mann granted a tell-all interview with Australian Women’s Weekly in 2001, opening up about the difficulties in her marriage to Rupert Murdoch. She said he was “extremely hard, ruthless, and determined that he was going to go through with this no matter what I wanted or what I was trying to do to save the marriage.

“He had no interest in that whatsoever.”

In the same interview, Murdoch-Mann also expressed fear at the idea of her children competing to be their father’s successor, and she included her stepdaughter, Prudence, the daughter from Murdoch’s first marriage to model Patricia Booker, as one of those children.

“I think they’re all so good that they could do whatever they wanted,” she said. “But I think there’s going to be a lot of heartbreak and hardship with this [fight for succession].”

That dynamic inspired the hit HBO show Succession.

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 $1.1bn each for their shares in the business.

Murdoch-Mann was born Anna Torv in Glasgow, Scotland. Her father, Jakob Torv, an Estonian merchant seaman, and her Scottish mother, migrated to Australia in 1944 when she was nine years old, settling in Sydney’s western suburbs. Biographers of Murdoch suggest the young Anna had a difficult childhood after her parents split, raising her younger siblings.

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.

She also authored three novels – In Her Own Image (1985), Family Business (1988), and Coming to Terms (1992)- and became involved in philanthropic causes benefiting children.

A 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.

She held leadership roles at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Haiti’s Hospital Albert Schweitzer and in 1998 was made a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II.

Murdoch-Mann 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 – an era during which her aunt was the most powerful woman inside the real-life Murdoch empire.