Toukie Smith, Top Runway Model and ‘227’ Actress, Dies at 74

Toukie Smith, the runway model and actress best known for playing Eva Rawley on the NBC sitcom 227, has died at age 74. People.com reported that Smith died on Nov. 4 at a New York hospital following what her twin children called a "long, courageous battle" with multiple sclerosis. Parade Magazine said she died Wednesday at a hospital in New York. Her children, Airyn and Julian, whom she shared with former partner Robert De Niro, announced her death, according to The Hollywood Reporter as cited by both outlets.

Born Doris Smith on Sept. 25, 1952, in Philadelphia, she took the stage name Toukie from a nickname her grandmother gave her, inspired by a children's record about a little red fire engine. In a February 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times, she said, "It was a nickname my grandmother gave me that came from a children's record about a little red fire engine with lots of energy. I've always had lots of energy." People.com reported that she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and began modeling by 1972 for magazines including Vogue and Ebony and for designers Hubert de Givenchy, Thierry Mugler, Issey Miyake and Patrick Kelly. She also worked with her brother, fashion designer Willi Smith, who died in 1987 at age 39 from complications related to AIDS, as well as illustrators Alvaro and Antonio Lopez and photographers Jean-Paul Goude and Guy Bourdin.

Smith's acting career took off in the late 1980s with multiple episodes in season 4 of NBC's Miami Vice as Angie, opposite Don Johnson's Sonny Crockett and Sheena Easton's Caitlin Davies. In 1989 she joined the cast of 227 as Eva alongside Marla Gibbs. The sitcom followed residents of an apartment building in Washington, D.C., and aired from 1985 to 1990. She also appeared in 1990s films including Talkin' Dirty After Dark, I Like It Like That and The Preacher's Wife, and opened an eponymous restaurant on New York City's West Houston Street.

Smith and De Niro were together from 1988 to 1996 and welcomed twins Airyn and Julian on Oct. 20, 1995, through a surrogate, following De Niro's divorce from Diahnne Abbott. Their relationship was on-and-off, with a reported split in 1994 before getting back together, per the New Yorker. Asked about the relationship in 1990, Smith told the Los Angeles Times, "What's great about a private life is it's private." Airyn made headlines in 2025 when she publicly discussed her identity as a transgender woman.