Patricia Booker
Rupert Murdoch with Patricia Booker in New York in 1991. Photo: Zuma Press / Alamy Rupert Murdoch’s first wife was Patricia Booker, a flight attendant and department store model from Melbourne. The couple married in 1956 in Australia, when they were 25 years old. They had a child, their daughter Prudence, a newspaper executive, and divorced in 1967 after 11 years of marriage.
Anna Torv
Rupert Murdoch with Anna Torv at the 1997 Humanitarian of the Year Awards in New York. Photo: Evan Agostini / Getty Images A year later, Murdoch married Glasgow-born former Anna Torv journalist. They are believed to have met while Torv was working for Murdoch’s Sydney newspaper, the Daily Mirror, when she had the opportunity to interview him. The media mogul divorced Torv in 1999, after 32 years of marriage. They have three children: Elisabeth, Lachlan and James. Torv once praised her husband as a “very good and moral man”, whose ownership of the Sun newspaper was often out of context. She was the director of News Corp’s board of directors from 1990 until the two divorced. In a 2001 interview with Australian Women’s Weekly about their separation, Anna said: “I began to believe that the Rupert Murdoch I loved had died a long time ago. Maybe I was in love with the idea of still being in love with him. “But the Rupert I fell in love with could not behave that way.”
Wendi Deng
Wendi Deng arrives for the Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May. Photo: Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty Images Murdoch, 91, has been married to Chinese-born businessman Wendi Deng for 14 years. They met at a company party in Hong Kong in 1997, while Deng, who was more than 30 years his junior, was an intern at a News Corp.-owned television station. Two years later, the couple exchanged vows on Murdoch yacht Morning Glory in New York Harbor. They divorced in 2014 and have two children, Grace and Chloe. Murdoch cited the irreparable breakdown of the marriage for more than six months as the cause of the divorce. Born in China and educated in Yale, Deng was credited with reforming her partner by introducing him to a younger, more tech-savvy group of friends, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Deng famously blocked an attack by protester Jonathan May-Bowles, who threw a pie at her husband during a hearing by the British parliamentary committee on the News International scandal in 2011.
Jerry Hall
Murdoch married Jerry Hall at St Bride’s Church in London in 2016, having met a year earlier. The ceremony was a week before Murdoch’s 85th birthday and invited guests Bob Geldof, Sir Michael Kane and Rebecca Brooks, Editor-in-Chief of Murdoch’s Stable News UK. It came after a five-month flirtation with the former supermodel, who had previously dated the Rolling Stones frontman Sir Mick Jagger for more than 20 years. Hall, who has four children,’s marriage to Jagger in Bali in 1992 was declared legally invalid after a fierce battle in the Supreme Court.
