Toukie Smith, a top model in the 1970s and an actress who appeared as Eva Rawley on the Marla Gibbs-starring NBC sitcom ‘227’, has died.
Smith died in a New York hospital after a “long, courageous battle” with multiple sclerosis, according to an announcement from her twins, Airyn and Julian, whom she shared with former partner Robert De Niro. Smith, whose brother, fashion designer Willi Smith, died in 1987 at age 39 of complications from AIDS, modelled for her brother as well as for fashion designers Hubert de Givenchy, Thierry Mugler, Issey Miyake and Patrick Kelly, illustrators Alvaro and Antonio Lopez and photographers Jean-Paul Goude and Guy Bourdin, among others.
Airyn and Julian noted in a statement that their mom “shared in a remarkable family legacy that helped shape American fashion and culture” and that “her beauty, grace and unmistakable presence helped pave the way for generations of Black models and designers in fashion.” In 1989, she joined ‘227’ as Eva, an artist who moves into the Lexington Place building whose landlord is Gibbs’ Mary Jenkins, and she recurred on the comedy during its final two seasons through May 1990. Doris Smith was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 25, 1952.
She said her grandmother called her Toukie after listening to “a children’s record about a little red fire engine with lots of energy,” she said in 1990. “I’ve always had lots of energy,” she said in 1990.
She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and began her modelling career in 1972, eventually appearing in a photo campaign for Yves St. Laurent and on the pages of such magazines as ‘Vogue’, ‘Ebony’, ‘Cosmopolitan’, ‘Redbook’ and ‘Seventeen’. In 1978, Bloomingdale’s named her its model of the year. Smith left modelling in the early ’80s and in 1987-88 appeared on three episodes of NBC’s ‘Miami Vice’ as Angie, the assistant to the pop singer Caitlin Davies (Sheena Easton) — and wife of Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett — on the show’s fourth season.
Her acting résumé also included roles in the films ‘Talkin’ Dirty After Dark’ (1991), ‘I Like It Like That’ (1994) and ‘Joe’s Apartment’ and ‘The Preacher’s Wife’, both released in 1996. In the ’90s, she had an eponymous restaurant on West Houston Street in New York. She and De Niro were partners from 1988-96, and their twins were conceived by in vitro fertilization and delivered by a surrogate mother.
The actor has five other children with three other women. “Toukie was a force of nature,” Airyn and Julian said.
“She left an indelible mark on our hearts and on everyone lucky enough to know her.” She was 74.
