Toukie Smith, 1970s supermodel and actress who appeared as Eva Rawley in the NBC sitcom starring Marla Gibbs 227died. She was 74 years old.
Smith died Wednesday in a New York hospital after a “long and courageous battle” with multiple sclerosis, according to an announcement from her twins, Airyn and Julian, whom she shared with former partner Robert De Niro.
Her brother, fashion designer Willi Smith, died in 1987 at the age of 39 from complications of AIDS.
Smith has modeled for his brother as well as 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 mother “shared a remarkable family legacy that helped shape American fashion and culture” and that “her beauty, grace and incomparable presence helped pave the way for generations of Black models and designers in the fashion world.”
In 1989, she joined 227 as Eva, an artist who moves into the Lexington Place building owned by Gibbs’ Mary Jenkins, and she returned to the comedy in its final two seasons until May 1990. (Her character manages the building for a time.)
Doris Smith was born in Philadelphia on September 25, 1952. She said her grandmother named her Toukie after listening to “a children’s record about a little red fire truck with a lot of energy. I always had a lot of energy,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990.
She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and began her modeling career in 1972, eventually appearing in a photo campaign for Yves St. Laurent and on the pages of magazines such as Vogue, Ebony, Cosmopolitan, Red Book And Seventeen. In 1978, Bloomingdale’s named her Model of the Year.
Smith left modeling in the early 1980s and appeared in three episodes of NBC in 1987-88. Miami Vice as Angie, the assistant of pop singer Caitlin Davies (Sheena Easton) – and wife of Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett – in the series’ fourth season.
His acting resume also included roles in films Talking dirty after dark (1991), I like it like that (1994) and Joe’s apartment And The pastor’s wifeboth released in 1996.
In the 1990s, she ran an eponymous restaurant on West Houston Street in New York.
She and De Niro were partners from 1988 to 1996, and their twins were conceived through 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 in our hearts and in the hearts of all those lucky enough to know her.”
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