| Anna dePeyster | |
| Birth Name: | Anna Maria Torv |
| Birth Date: | 30 June 1944 |
| Birth Place: | Glasgow, Scotland |
| Occupation: | Journalist and novelist |
| Spouse: | |
| Children: | Elisabeth Murdoch Lachlan Murdoch James Murdoch |
| Relations: | Anna Torv (niece) |
Anna Maria dePeyster (née Torv; formerly Murdoch and Mann; born 30 June 1944) is a British and Australian journalist and novelist.
Anna Maria Torv was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1944[1] to Jakob Tõrv (anglicised Jacob Torv), an Estonian merchant seaman, and Sylvia Iris Bodfish, a Scottish drycleaner's shop assistant.[2] Her parents had a drycleaning business in Glasgow, until they emigrated to Australia.[2] When they opened a picnic park outside Sydney and it went bankrupt, her mother left the family household. She has two brothers, Jaan and Hans Arvid, and one sister Karin Elisabeth. Raised Catholic, she attended Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia.[2]
Torv started her journalistic career at the age of 18, working on Sydney's Daily Mirror,[3] and also worked as a journalist for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.[1] She later served on the board of directors of News Corporation.[1]
She has written three books.[1] Her first novel, In Her Own Image, is about two sisters who fall in love with the same man on a sheep station close to the Murrumbidgee River.[4]
Torv was married to Rupert Murdoch from 1967 to 1999.[1] [4] [5] [6] They had three children:
When they divorced on 8 June 1999, she reportedly received $1.7 billion (including $110 million in cash) from the settlement.[1] [5] She remarried six months later, to William Mann, a financier. They remained married until his death in August 2017.[1] [2] [5] They resided in the Hamptons, in a house formerly owned by the philanthropist Yasmin Aga Khan.[2] After Mann’s death, she married again in April 2019 to Ashton dePeyster.[7]
According to The Independent, the people who in 1969 kidnapped and then killed Muriel McKay, wife of Murdoch's deputy Alick McKay, had originally intended to kidnap Anna Murdoch instead, and confusion arose when the McKays had made use of one of Murdoch's vehicles.
In 1998, she was made a Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great.[8]