MEDIA MOGUL RUPERT Murdoch will marry actress and former supermodel Jerry Hall, the couple announced in The London Times today.
It follows a four-month romance.
The couple got engaged over the weekend in Los Angeles, where they attended the 73rd Golden Globes awards gala – although Hall was not pictured sporting a ring on the red carpet.
Murdoch, the 84-year-old executive chairman of News Corporation, which owns the Times, announced the impending nuptials in the Births, Marriages and Deaths section of the newspaper.
“Mr Rupert Murdoch, father of Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, James, Grace and Chloe Murdoch, and Miss Jerry Hall, mother of Elizabeth, James, Georgia and Gabriel Jagger, are delighted to announce their engagement,” it read.
The pair started dating in the late summer after being introduced by one of Murdoch’s sisters and his niece in Australia.
Rugby outing
They first made their relationship public in October at the rugby World Cup final in London, where they were pictured kissing and cuddling in Twickenham stadium.
Between them they have 10 children from previous marriages, and went on holiday with several of them on a yacht in the Caribbean after Christmas.
A spokesman for the Murdoch family said:
They have loved these past months together, are thrilled to be getting married and excited about their future.
No date for their wedding has been given.
This will be Murdoch’s fourth marriage and technically the first for 59-year-old Hall, an American.
She had a Hindu ceremony with Mick Jagger in 1990 in Bali, although a court later ruled the ceremony was not legally binding when they split up nine years later.
Hall also dated British musician Bryan Ferry, of Roxy Music, before leaving him for Jagger.
Australian-born Murdoch, now a US citizen, was married to Patricia Booker, journalist Anna Torv and most recently Wendi Deng, who he split from in 2013.
Billionaire
With an estimated fortune of more than $11 billion, Murdoch owns some of the world’s most famous newspaper titles, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The Sun.
He hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2011, when British police arrested several journalists from Murdoch’s now closed News of the World for allegedly hacking voicemails of celebrities, soldiers and a murdered teenager for stories.
The scandal snowballed, with nine journalists from Murdoch’s empire finally convicted in the biggest police investigation in British history.
Less charitable social media users greeted news of the engagement with amusement, with one quipping on Twitter:
Love is not only blind but deaf and can’t read… And that goes for both sides.
But Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, owned by rival German media group Bauer, dismissed such comments as “cynical,” wishing: “Good luck to them!”
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