Who Is Rupert Murdoch First Wife, Patricia Booker? Explore His Married Life

Keith Rupert Murdoch, known simply as Rupert Murdoch, is a businessman, media proprietor, and investor.

He owns hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets worldwide through his company News Corp. Here are all the newspaper companies he owns:

• In the United Kingdom, he owns The Sun and The Times
• In Australia, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, and The Australian
• In the United States, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post

He owns the book publisher HarperCollins and Sky News television channels Sky News Australia and Fox News.

Until 2018, Murdoch owned Sky Group Limited, a British Media Conglomerate, until 2019, 21st Century Fox.

Murdoch is among the wealthiest people in the world, alongside one of the most powerful.

Quick Facts About Rupert Murdoch

Who Is Rupert Murdoch First Wife, Patricia Booker?

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch married his first wife, Patricia Booker, when he was only 25. The two married in 1956 and had one child, Prudence, in 1958.

Before and during their marriage, Booker was a shop assistant and flight attendant from Melbourne. Their marriage lasted little over a decade, and they divorced in 1967.

Perhaps because their marriage ended so long ago, not much is known about Patricia Booker. In the decades since the end of their marriage, Murdoch has gone and had many other marriages and children that have taken the media’s attention.

Booker has essentially disappeared from the public’s eye since the divorce and is perhaps living a quiet life far away from media scrutiny.

However, the years directly following her divorce were tempestuous at best, as it has been said that Booker married a Swiss National and began to lead a life of partying. This led to her having a poor relationship with her daughter.

How Many Other Wives Does Rupert Murdoch Have?

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has been married a whopping four times and has had six children. As stated above, his first marriage was with Patricia Booker from 1956 to 1967.

He then married Anna Maria Torv from 1967 to 1999, Wendi Deng from 1999 to 2013, and Jerry Hall in 2016, though they recently divorced.

Murdoch’s second wife, Anna Maria Torv, was born Anna Maria Mann dePeyster on June 30, 1944. Torv is a Scottish journalist and novelist born in Glasgow, Scotland.

She was born to an Estonian-born merchant seaman named Jacob Torv and a Scottish dry cleaner named Sylvia Braida. Besides Anna, they had two sons and another daughter.

Her parents worked together in a dry cleaning business in Glasgow until the whole family moved to Australia, where they opened a picnic park outside Sydney. Sadly, the business went bankrupt, and Torv’s mother left the family.

Torv was raised Catholic and attended Our Lady of Mercy College in Parramatta in, New South Wales. Torv started her career as a journalist at 18 by working on Sydney’s Daily Mirror.

She also worked as a journalist for the Sydney Dail Telegraph and later served on the News Corporation’s board of directors.

She has written three books so far, with the most popular being the first one, “In Her Own Image.” The novel is about two sisters who unfortunately fall for the same man at a Murrumbidgee River sheep station.

Murdoch married Torv soon after his divorce from Booker in 1967, and they had three children together. They are:

• Elisabeth Murdoch, born in 1968
• Lachlan Murdoch, born in 1971, and
• James Murdoch, born in 1972

It is believed that Murdoch and Torv met while the latter was working for Murdoch’s Sydney newspaper, The Daily Mirror.

They met when she got an opportunity to interview him.

During their marriage, Torv praised her husband and described him as a good and moral human being. The two divorced in 1999, citing irreconcilable differences, and Torv reportedly received over $1.7 billion from the divorce, including $110 million in cash, from the settlement.

She then married William Mann, a financier, six months after the divorce was finalized. Mann passed away in 2017, and Torv has since remarried Ashton dePyster in April 2019.

Murdoch then married Wendi Deng, a Chinese-born American entrepreneur, media mogul, movie producer, investor, and art collector.

Deng was born on December 5, 1968, and is 37 years Murdoch’s junior.

She was born in Jinan, Shandong, raised in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, and has two older sisters and a brother. She was born to engineer parents, and her family name was originally Deng Wenge, but she changed Wenge to Wendi as a teen.

As a child, she studied at Xuzhou No. 1 Middle School, where she became a competitive volleyball player.

However, her father relocated to Guangzhou to become a factory director at People’s Machinery Works, and she and her family joined their father a short time later.

At 16, Deng enrolled at the Guangzhou Medical College, and in 1988, she went to the United States on a study permit.

Once she reached America, she enrolled at California Unversity, Northridge, studying economics and becoming among the top-scoring students.  She graduated with a BA in Economics and then an MBA from Yale University.

She graduated from Yale in 1996 and met Bruce Churchill sometime later. Churchill, overseeing finance and corporate development at Los Angeles’ Fox TV branch, became deeply impressed by Deng and offered her an internship.

This internship would take place at News Corp subsidiary Star TV in Hong Kong and eventually develop into a full-time executive position.

Because of her talent, Deng had a role in working to plan Star TV’s operations in Hong King and China despite being a junior employee. She helped build up Chinese distribution for Star TV’s Channel V music channel, and within a year, she became vice president.

Before Murdoch, Deng had been married to Jake Cherry. She’d met Chery when he and his wife Joyce had hosted her during her studies in the US.

Cherry later left his wife and married Deng in 1990, which is how she got a green card.

The marriage lasted two years and seven months, but Cherry later said that they’d only stayed together for four or five months as he’d found out Deng had been spending time with a man closer to her age. Deng met Murdoch in 1997 while working on Hong Kong’s Star TV. Murdoch conveniently owed Star TV.

They married shortly after Murdoch divorced Anna Torv, and Torv has stated that their relationship had started long before the divorce.

Deng and Murdoch got married less than three weeks after the finalization of his divorce from his second wife aboard his Yacht, Morning Glory. The two have two children named Grace and Chloe. The former was born in 2001, and the latter was born in 2003.

The former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is Grace’s godfather.

The most memorable part of their marriage was when Deng attacked comedian Jonnie Marbles for throwing a pie at her husband on July 19, 2011. Their marriage ended in June 2013, when Murdoch filed for Divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

According to various sources, Deng had been cheating on Murdoch with Tony Blair, and although none of the parties have spoken about it, Murdoch did end his long-standing association with Blair in 2014.

After three years of staying single, the only years since he was 25 that Murdoch wasn’t married, he wed famed model Jerry Hall.

Jerry Faye Hall is famous for being a model and one of the most sought-after during her heyday and for her long-term relationship with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.

Hall was born in Gonzalez, Texas, on July 2, 1956, the same year Murdoch married his first wife. Hall began her modeling career in the 1970s, 1975, by gracing the cover of Roxy Music’s album Siren.

By 1977, she had been on 40 magazine covers like Cosmopolitan and Italian Vogue.

Since then, She has been in many movies, most notably Batman, and has become a beloved celebrity for her looks, talent, and cultural capital.  Many people see her as a countercultural figure due to her relationship with Mick Jagger. She began her relationship with Mick Jagger the same year, and the two were together until 1999.  Before Jagger, she had been with musician Bryan Ferry for a short time.

She and Jagger have four children: Elizabeth, James, Georgia, and Gabriel.

She married Rupert Murdoch on March 4, 2016, at the Church of England’s church of St Bride’s on Fleet Street. However, this marriage would also be short-lived, as the New York Times reported that the two were divorcing on June 22, 2022, with Hall filing for divorce on July 1, 2022.

The divorce was finalized in August 2022. Once again, the reason was irreconcilable differences.

How Many Children Does Rupert Murdoch Have?

As stated above, Rupert Murdoch has six children in total, one with his first wife, three with his second, and two with his third.

He had one child from his first marriage, a daughter called Prudence “Prue” Murdoch MacLeod.

She is currently a non-executive director in the media industry and has held various directorial roles in News Corporation, owned by her father. Prudence is also a board member of Times Newspaper Ltd, a News Corporation subsidiary.

Born on August 1958 in Adelaide, South Australia, Prudence moved to London with her father following her parent’s divorce.

Alongside having a poor relationship with her mother, as stated above, Prudence also had a poor relationship with her ex-stepmother, Anna Torv.

Her relationship with her father seems to be better, as Prudence has been described as the only one of Murdoch’s children not directly competing for his financial affection. Prudence married her first husband, Crispin Odey, in 1985, but the marriage was very brief as they separated and divorced within fifteen months with no children.

She married her second and current husband, Alasdair MacLeod, in 1989.  MacLeod is a businessman who studied in the famed English college of Eton and works for Murdoch.

He famously went against his wife’s wishes to do so. They have three children:

• James, born in 1991
• Angus, born in 1993, and
• Clementine, born in 1996

Murdoch had three children from his second marriage, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James.

Elisabeth Murdoch is currently a media executive based in the United Kingdom. She was born in Sydney on August 22, 1968, and studied in New York City.

Her career has been mostly based around media, specifically FX Networks, and through her father’s help, she has become a successful albeit mildly controversial business figure. Like her father, she has been married multiple times, three to be exact, and has four children.

Her first marriage was to a fellow Vassar graduate, her alma mater, named Elkin Kwesi Pianim, in 1993.

The marriage lasted till 1998, but they had two children named Cornelia Pianim and Anna Pianim, born in 1994 and 1997, respectively. She then married Matthew Freud, the famed psychologist Sigmund Freud’s great-grandson, in August 2001.

The couple divorced in 2014, but they, too, had two children. She is married to artist Keith Tyson, whom she married in 2017.

Elisabeth’s two brother’s Lachlan and James, are also businessmen and work in various organizations and companies owned by their father.  Lachlan is the more controversial figure among the two, as he is mired in different lawsuits.

James has resigned from the board of directors of his father’s company, News Corporation.  Lachlan is married to British-born Australian model and actress Sarah O’Hare, whom he wed in 1999, with whom he has three children, two sons named Kalan and Aida and a daughter named Aerin.

The children were born in 2004, 2006, and 2010 respectively.

James is also married, and his wife’s name is Kathryn Hufscmid, whom he wed in 2000. He has three children: Anneka, born in 2003, Walter, born in 2004, and Emerson, born in 2008.

Lastly, as stated above, Murdoch has two children named Grace and Chloe from his third wife. Grace studies at Yale, and Chloe studies at Standford.

Some FAQs

How Many Times Has Rupert Murdoch Gotten Married?

He has been married four times

How Many Times Has Rupert Murdoch Gotten Divorced?

He has been divorced four times

How Many Children Does Rupert Murdoch Have?

He has six children from his first three wives