Cleo, whose birth name was Youree Harris, was battling colon cancer that spread to her liver and lungs, her rep told TMZ. The “Miss Cleo” character was the property of Access Resource Services, based in Fort Lauderdale.
Advertisement
Cleo is survived by her children and grandchildren.
“I don’t know who, but I’m certain that I helped some people”, Harris said during an interview for the documentary.
“She was not Jamaican when I met her”, Crawford said. She had two daughters. I never felt bad, but I knew society didn’t accept me. The commercials ended with the tagline, “Call me now!”. It was still a better deal than the 14 cents per minute that her supposedly clairvoyant colleagues took in, she reasoned.
Her Psychic Readers Network character Miss Cleo had a Jamaican accent.
“I’m a proud voodoo woman”, she told the Spokesman-Review in 2009. “She spoke the same English I speak”. “When you grow up in America and you’re Caribbean, your parents beat it into you that the only way to succeed is by dropping the patois”. In 2002, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an investigation that revealed a list of aliases and a longer list of former colleagues on the local theater scene who said they had been cheated out of money and questioned her Jamaican background.
In 2006, she gained attention for coming out as a lesbian. She told the publication that her clients were her “village”.
Harris was famous, or infamous, for her late TV show that hosted a hotline at the end of the 1990s. They found that not only were callers charged, but also that some of the “psychics” were really actors. And while word of her death is still spreading, many have already expressed their condolences, and the tributes to Miss Cleo have been genuinely touching, and – OK, OK – strangely humorous. She even released an album of it called Convicted for My Beliefs. But there are places where I go and people are like, ‘Yo! That year, she did an interview with Vice, saying that she is still recognized on the street.
Advertisement
The Psychic Readers Network was sued by the FCC in 2002 for, among other things, “misrepresenting the nature of the “free” readings offered”, and Harris mostly disappeared from our the public eye. The experience of seeing herself was eye-opening, she said. I love to laugh.
