Toukie Smith

Toukie Smith died on Wednesday 4 November 2026 in a hospital in New York, aged 74. Her twins, Airyn and Julian, announced that she had died after a "long, courageous battle" with multiple sclerosis. Her death was reported on 9 November 2026 by The Hollywood Reporter, Parade and other outlets. No funeral or memorial arrangements had been made public at the time of the reports.

Doris A. Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 25 September 1952. Her mother worked in a factory and her father was a butcher, and she grew up with two brothers, one of whom was the fashion designer Willi Smith.

The name Toukie came from her grandmother, who called her that after listening to a children's record about a little red fire engine with lots of energy. "I've always had lots of energy," Smith told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. She went on to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Smith began modelling in 1972 and became one of the leading runway models of the decade. She worked for Chanel, Versace, Hubert de Givenchy, Geoffrey Beene, Issey Miyake, Norma Kamali, Thierry Mugler and Patrick Kelly, and modelled for her brother's label WilliWear. She worked with the illustrators Alvaro and Antonio Lopez and the photographers by Jean-Paul Goude and Guy Bourdin, among others. Her print career included a campaign for Yves Saint Laurent and appearances in Vogue, Elle, Ebony, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Seventeen. In 1978 Bloomingdale's named her its Model of the Year, and she became the second African American model to have a department store mannequin designed in her likeness.

She left modelling in the early 1980s and moved into acting. During the 1987 to 1988 season she appeared in three episodes of NBC's Miami Vice as Angie, the assistant to Sheena Easton's character Caitlin Davies, and she appeared in the 1988 film Me and Him. In 1989 she joined the cast of the NBC sitcom 227, starring Marla Gibbs, as Eva Rawley, an artist who moves into the Lexington Place building and for a time manages it. She remained with the show through its final two seasons, until May 1990.

Her later film credits included Talkin' Dirty After Dark (1991), I Like It Like That (1994), Joe's Apartment (1996), The Preacher's Wife (1996) and Goosed (1999). In the 1990s she also owned a restaurant named Toukie's on West Houston Street in Manhattan, which was written about in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

From 1988 to 1996 Smith was the partner of the actor Robert De Niro. They did not marry. Their twins, Airyn and Julian, were conceived by in vitro fertilisation and born to a surrogate mother in October 1995; at the time a spokesman for De Niro said the two would share the parenting of the children. Airyn De Niro later spoke publicly about being a transgender woman.

Smith's brother Willi Smith, the founder of WilliWear, died in 1987 at the age of 39 of complications from AIDS. Smith lived for many years in Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan.

Smith was part of a generation of Black models who broke into the top tier of international fashion in the 1970s, and her Bloomingdale's mannequin was a rare recognition in an industry that had long excluded Black women from such honours. She was closely bound up with the legacy of her brother Willi Smith, whose street wear she helped present to the world. To television viewers she remained Eva Rawley of 227, and obituaries recalled her energy and warmth on and off the runway.