Despite being born in Los Angeles, Miss Cleo’s became a cult figure in the late ’90s and early ’00s playing a Jamaican TV psychic known for her catchphrase, “CALL ME NOW!”. She had recently been hospitalized but was discharged last week to a hospice center, TMZ reports. Her rep told the site Harris was a “pillar of strength” and died surrounded by family and friends. She was the queen of TV psychics and dominated the decade with her kitschy fortune-telling commercials, promising callers intimate deets on their future love lives, careers and anything else their questioning hearts desired (for a per-minute fee, of course).
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She told Vice that she was gifted in the supernatural, having come from a “family of Obeah – which is another word for voodoo”.
I called Miss Cleo one time in 9th grade while I was watching BET Uncut. “She will be dearly missed by us all”.
Harris also lent her voice to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in 2002.
The hotline company and its later incarnation was sued and accused of deceptive practices before the owners settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2002. This did not go over well, and Miss Cleo came over to me and told me I was wrong. Miss Cleo didn’t own the company, but she still had as many skeptics as she did fans.
In 2006, Cleo – a mother of two – came out publicly as a lesbian, explaining to The Advocate, “This is me”.
The iconic phone psychic Miss Cleo died Tuesday after a battle with cancer.
The Miss Cleo character was later revived when she appeared in adverts for a used vehicle dealership in Florida.
The L.A. native previously spoke about her work as a psychic in the documentaries Becoming Psychic (2010) and Hotline (2014).
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The New York Times says that a former cast member stated that her accent was indeed fake and said that she was born and raised in LA, information later confirmed by BuzzFeed where Harris birth certificate was made public.
