Rupert Murdoch has called off his engagement to his prospective fifth wife, Ann Lesley Smith, months before they were due to get married.
The 92-year-old media tycoon announced his engagement two weeks ago, when he said that the 66-year-old American radio host would be his “last” wife.
She was seen last week wearing an 11-carat diamond engagement ring, said to be worth about US$2 million, and a summer wedding was planned, but sources confirmed that the whirlwind romance is now over.
Vanity Fair magazine claimed that Murdoch had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with his fiancee’s outspoken evangelical views.
According to other reports, the couple came to a “mutual decision” after a heart-to-heart discussion on Monday night, during which Smith said she was struggling to cope with being in the public eye.
Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, model and actor Jerry Hall, last year, and was first seen with Smith in January, when they were spotted on holiday together in Barbados.
Murdoch said after his engagement in March: “I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love – but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy.”
He suggested that he expected a long marriage by saying that “we’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” but he now appears to have fallen out of love as quickly as he fell in love.
Smith and Murdoch met last September at an event at his vineyard in California. It was a month after Murdoch and Jerry Hall had divorced.
Smith is known as Rev Ann in her volunteer role as a police chaplain, which followed her discovery of evangelical Christianity following the end of her first marriage.
She has said in the past that: “As I began to walk with God, the things of the world just seemed pointless to me.”
She described her relationship with Murdoch as “a gift from God…I speak Rupert’s language. We share the same beliefs.”
She added in an interview last month: “In perspective, it’s not my first rodeo.
“Getting near 70 means being in the last half. I waited for the right time. Friends are happy for me.”
Smith worked as a dental hygienist after leaving university, then became a model, a radio journalist and a singer-songwriter.
She has spoken in the past about an “abusive” first marriage to John B. Huntingdon, a railway heir, that left her on the brink of suicide, and about becoming homeless for a period when her marriage ended.
She turned to Christianity and started preaching in the street in California, and later married to Chester Smith, the country music singer, releasing an album with him in 2005.
When he died in 2008 she ended up in a court battle with her stepdaughters over his fortune. Murdoch’s first marriage was in 1956 to air hostess Patricia Booker, the mother of his eldest child Prudence.
In 1967 they divorced and in the same year he married journalist Anna Torv, the mother of Elisabeth, Lachlan and James Murdoch.
Their marriage ended in 1999 and 17 days later he married Wendi Deng, who was 38 years his junior and worked for his STAR TV network. The couple had two daughters, Grace and Chloe.
Murdoch filed for divorce from Deng in 2013, and in 2016 he married Hall, who was 25 years younger than him. They divorced in August 2022.
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