Factfile
Name: Anna Murdoch
Born: Scotland, 1945
Lives: Los Angeles, New York, London, Aspen and Australia
Occupation: Author, wife, mother, media executive
Famous for: Being the wife of Rupert Murdoch
Why in the News: But not for much longer. . .
Two of the most enduring relationships in the notoriously insecure worlds of music and the media came to a sudden end this week. Linda McCartney died. Anna Murdoch got fed up.
Fed up, a friend suggested this week, of fitting in with the schedule of a media magnate whose work load gets heavier, perversely, with every advancing year. Fed up of nights apart, for the sake of an £8billion dynasty and the buzz of the next deal.
At 53 it seems Anna Murdoch - a clever, capable and attractive woman - is tired of taking second place to Rupert Murdoch's megolomaniacal endeavours. This far but no further will she go.
It is a sad occasion when any marriage ends. Next week the couple would have celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary. But controlling around 200 newspapers and a host of TV channels across the globe can do a certain amount to soften even this, the cruellest of blows.
The distasteful task of revealing that your marriage has broken down for example can be transformed into a superbly orchestrated announcement.
What'll it be this time Rupert? What about telling the world about your little difficulty in the tittle-tattle page in your fine tabloid publication The New York Post?
Perfect. Gossip columnist Liz Smith would be perfectly placed to deliver the news with just the right level of sycophantic slush. "It is with some personal sadness that I announce the amicable separation of Rupert Murdoch and his beautiful wife Anna. . .etc etc etc.
In Britain the Murdoch-owned Sun will report on the matter reverentially or not at all. And The Sunday Times won't dare intrude on the private grief of Citizen Murdoch.
It is understood that Anna Murdoch's main gripe is that her husbands career means they spend too much time apart. She has lived this way since she met Rupert Murdoch.
Was it too much to ask that in their later years they could enjoy each other, that he could cut down on the 20-hour days he regularly works?
Apparently so. Linda Melvern author of The End of the Street (the inside story of how Murdoch broke the UK print unions) recalls an anecdote which illustrates exactly what Anna Murdoch is up against.
"She and her children were sitting around a table and her son Lachlan said `Mummy is Daddy deaf?' Anna replied straight away `no he is just not listening to you'," she says.
A committed Catholic, it is thought she may also be unimpressed with her husband's recent foray into China, a country where forced abortion is a daily reality.
And it is because she is a Catholic that friends suggest the separation may be temporary. One said this week that Anna "would never countenance a divorce".
Anna Murdoch was born Anna Torv in Scotland to an Estonian father and a Scottish mother. Jakob Torv worked as an engineer and his wife was a dry cleaner. When their daughter was nine years old they moved to Australia.
As a teenager she showed interest in a journalistic career and by her early 20s she had landed a trainee job on the Sydney Daily Mirror. At 22 she was sent to interview the publisher.
It was the first time Anna Torv met Rupert Murdoch. "I thought she was a very pretty girl," Murdoch said of her later. "Her writing skills were not on my mind."
She apparently fell for his energy and dynamism: "He was like a whirlwind coming into the room".
The whirlwind brought a daughter from a previous marriage to the union when Anna and Rupert wed the following year. Those who saw them together generally remarked on how close they were.
As his empire grew she became more and more involved in the business, eventually becoming a member on the board of Murdoch's company News International. It is a position she will retain despite the break-up.
"Anna's the most critical at board meetings. She'll speak up; you bet she does," he has said of her.
As time went by, business began to have less appeal. In the late 1980s she began writing novels and increasing her support of charitable organisations.
When she spoke about her motivation for writing - her catalogue includes several well-received novels, some loosely autobiographical - it seemed the first cracks were beginning to appear.
"I needed something to do with my time. I have a preoccupied husband and my children don't need me so much anymore. I do it to fill in the loneliness," she said.
Her children with Murdoch, Elizabeth (30), Lachlan (26) and James (24), all have top positions in the family business. Lachlan is tipped to become "the first among equals" on his father's demise.
As their 67-year-old father ran around making sure that his legacy to his children is the biggest, most powerful media empire in the world, his wife, with her constant requests for more time together, had become just another obstacle.
That obstacle has now been removed. "The Murdochs say their situation is very painful and leaves them torn," wrote their mouthpiece Liz Smith in the New York Post on Tuesday. "But they are attempting to work out their differences."