‘227’ Actress Toukie Smith, Robert De Niro’s Former Partner, Has Died At 74

• Toukie Smith, the runway model and 227 actress, died Wednesday, November 4, 2026, at a hospital in New York. She was 74.
• Her twins, Airyn and Julian, said she died after a “long, courageous battle” with multiple sclerosis.
• Born Doris Smith in Philadelphia, she was Bloomingdale’s Model of the Year in 1978, played Eva Rawley on NBC’s 227 and was Robert De Niro’s partner for much of the late 1980s and 1990s.

Toukie Smith, the runway model who joined NBC’s 227 for its final season and later raised twins with Robert De Niro, has died at 74. Her children, Airyn and Julian, shared the news, and The Hollywood Reporter reported that she died on Wednesday, November 4, at a New York hospital after what the family called a “long, courageous battle” with multiple sclerosis.

She was born Doris Smith in Philadelphia on September 25, 1952, according to both The Hollywood Reporter and People. She kept a remarkable amount of her life out of view, including her years with De Niro and the two children they raised. No public statement from De Niro had been reported as of Monday. Years before this week, one of those children explained exactly how carefully their mother had protected them.

How Did Doris Smith Become Toukie?

The nickname came from her grandmother, who used to sing her a song about a fire engine. Smith told the Los Angeles Times in 1990 that the name made her think of “a little red fire engine with lots of energy,” People recalled this week. She studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and began modeling in 1972, and soon she was turning up in Vogue, Ebony and Cosmopolitan as well as in a Yves Saint Laurent campaign.

The runways of Paris and New York followed. She walked for designers including Hubert de Givenchy, Thierry Mugler and Issey Miyake, and she worked with photographers such as Guy Bourdin and Jean-Paul Goude. In 1978, Bloomingdale’s named her its Model of the Year, and a mannequin was made in her likeness, a rare honor for a Black model in that era.

The designer who mattered most to her was her older brother. Willi Smith founded the WilliWear label, and Toukie modeled for him for years. She also held on to everything he ever made her. “I have everything Willi made for me, from my sixth-grade graduation dress on,” she told the Los Angeles Times. Willi died in 1987 at 39 of complications from AIDS, and the very next stretch of her life would carry her far from the runway.

Why Did TV Viewers Suddenly Know Her Face?

Television came calling almost immediately. During the 1987 to 1988 season of Miami Vice, Smith appeared in three episodes as Angie, the assistant to Caitlin Davies, the singer played by Sheena Easton who married Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett. It was a small part on one of the most talked-about shows of the decade.

In 1989 she joined 227, the Marla Gibbs sitcom set among the neighbors of a Washington, D.C., apartment building. Smith played Eva Rawley, an artist, and she stayed with the show through its last episodes in May 1990. Eva was the late arrival among the regulars on the building’s famous front stoop.

Movies followed in the 1990s. She appeared in Talkin’ Dirty After Dark in 1991 and I Like It Like That in 1994, then in two 1996 releases, Joe’s Apartment and The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she also ran a restaurant bearing her name on West Houston Street in New York during that decade. Through all of it, the man in her life was one of the most famous actors in the world.

What Was Her Life With Robert De Niro Really Like?

Smith and De Niro began dating in 1988, the same year his marriage to his first wife, Diahnne Abbott, came to an end. The obituaries describe them as partners from 1988 to 1996, though the road was not perfectly straight. People noted that The New Yorker reported a split in 1994 and a reunion afterward.

Their twins arrived on October 20, 1995. They were conceived through in vitro fertilization and carried by a surrogate, according to People and The Hollywood Reporter. When the Associated Press reported the births that November, Smith’s spokesman said the romance had ended but that the two “obviously still have a very strong bond,” and De Niro’s side said they would share parenting duties in New York. Smith was 43 and a first-time mother. De Niro, then 52, already had two grown children, Drena and Raphael.

Their relationship ended for good in 1996, and De Niro married Grace Hightower the following year. Smith rarely discussed their years together in public. What came out instead, decades later, was a glimpse of the home she had built for their children.

What Did Their Daughter Say About the Way She Was Raised?

In April 2025, Airyn De Niro came out as a trans woman in an interview with the magazine Them. She said she had spent her life being visible but not truly seen, and she spoke about the choice her parents made when she and her brother Julian were small. “No parent is perfect, but I am grateful that both my parents agreed to keep me out of the limelight,” she said, as Global News reported. “They have told me they wanted me to have as much of a normal childhood as possible.”

De Niro answered with a statement that was widely reported at the time. “I loved and supported Aaron as my son, and now I love and support Airyn as my daughter,” he said. “I don’t know what the big deal is. I love all my children.”

That quiet childhood was Toukie Smith’s doing as much as anyone’s. Airyn and Julian are 31 now, and this week they were the ones who told the world their mother was gone. Smith had explained her thinking long before they were born. “What’s great about a private life,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, “is it’s private.”