Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall, a former top model, are reportedly set to divorce. Hall was the billionaire media mogul’s fourth wife.
Patricia Booker
Rupert Murdoch’s first wife was Patricia Booker, a flight attendant and department store model from Melbourne. The couple wed in 1956 in Australia, when he was 25. They had one child, their daughter Prudence who is a newspaper executive, and divorced in 1967 after an 11-year marriage.
Anna Torv
A year later, Murdoch married Glasgow-born former newspaper journalist Anna Torv. 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 human being” whose ownership of the Sun newspaper was often taken out of context. She was a main board director of News Corp from 1990 until the two separated.
In a 2001 interview with Australian Women’s Weekly on their separation, Anna said: “I began to think the Rupert Murdoch that I loved died a long time ago. Perhaps I was in love with the idea of still being in love with him. But the Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way.”
Wendi Deng
The 91-year-old Murdoch was married to Chinese-born businesswoman 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 TV station owned by News Corp.
Two years later, the couple exchanged their vows onboard Murdoch’s garland-bedecked yacht, the Morning Glory, in New York Harbour. They divorced in 2014 and have two children, Grace and Chloe.
Murdoch cited irretrievable breakdown in the marriage for more than six months as the reason for the divorce. Deng, born in China and educated at Yale, was credited with a makeover of her partner, introducing him to a younger, more tech-savvy set of friends including the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter’s co-founder, Jack Dorsey.
Deng famously blocked an attack by protester Jonathan May-Bowles, who threw a pie at her husband during a British parliamentary committee hearing into the News International phone-hacking scandal in 2011.
Jerry Hall
Murdoch tied the knot with 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 guests included Bob Geldof, Sir Michael Caine and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Murdoch’s newspaper stable News UK.
It came after a five-month courtship with the former supermodel, who previously dated the Rolling Stones frontman Sir Mick Jagger for more than 20 years. Hall, who has four children, had her 1992 Bali wedding to Jagger deemed legally void after an acrimonious high court battle.
• This article was amended on 23 June 2022 to remove an image that was captioned as showing Rupert Murdoch with Patricia Booker but was, in fact, of Murdoch and Anna Torv.
