Mary Lea Johnson Richards; Broadway Stage Producer

Mary Lea Johnson Richards, co-producer of award-winning Broadway shows and films and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson health care products fortune, has died. She was 63.

Mrs. Richards died Thursday at Presbyterian-University Hospital in Pittsburgh of complications following a liver transplant.

The Producer Circle Co., which she formed with her husband, Marty Richards, in 1976, has won 22 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

Current productions include the Broadway musical “Grand Hotel,” which opened in New York Nov. 12, and the motion picture “Hart.”

Among their other Broadway shows were “Crimes of the Heart,” which won the Pulitzer, “On the Twentieth Century,” “Sweeney Todd” and “La Cage aux Folles.”

Films produced by the couple included “The Boys From Brazil” and “The Shining.”

Mrs. Richards was born Aug. 20, 1926, in New Brunswick, N.J., the eldest child of Johnson & Johnson heir J. Seward Johnson.

In the largest inheritance case in New York history, Mrs. Richards and her siblings contested the will of their father, who died in 1983. The will, and 30 previous wills, had excluded the children because Johnson felt he had previously provided for them by setting up trusts in the 1940s. Each child was a multimillionaire before the case was filed.

Johnson had left everything to his third wife, Barbara Piasecka Johnson, who had been a family maid and was 42 years his junior.

After a bitter 14-week trial in 1986, the case was settled a day before it was to go to the jury, with the children getting $42.5 million and about $10 million in fees for their attorneys. An oceanographic institute, the Harbor Branch Foundation, got $20 million. After paying attorney and executor fees and $80 million in taxes, the widow kept more than $300 million.

Besides her husband, Mrs. Richards is survived by five sons and a daughter from a previous marriage, two brothers, three sisters and nine grandchildren.