Sculptor Robert Graham arrives with his wife, actress Anjelica Huston, for 58th Annual Directors Guild Awards in Los Angeles (2006 file photo)

The world-famous Mexican-American sculptor Robert Graham has died.  He was 70 years old.

He created the life-size bronze sculpture of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a wheelchair at the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington.  The bronze panels at the memorial depicting the 54 social programs of Roosevelt's New Deal are also Graham's creation.

He also designed a memorial to jazz composer, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington in New York's Central Park and a monument to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in Kansas City, in the midwestern U.S. state of Missouri. 

In Detroit, in the northern U.S. state of Michigan, his Joe Louis Memorial honors the boxer with a 24-foot bronze monument in the shape of a massive fist and forearm suspended from a pyramid structure.

Graham designed the two headless figures known as the "Olympic Gateway" at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, in the western U.S. state of California, for the 1984 Olympics.

He was born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and an American father.  The Los Angeles Times says Graham did not know his father and was raised by his mother, his aunt and his grandmother.

The Times says Graham moved to California with his "three mothers" at age 11.

He was inducted into the California Hall of Fame this month.

Graham was married to actress Angelica Huston.
 

Some information for this report was provided by AP.