You don’t know her as Youree Dell Harris, but you know her as Miss Cleo.. Today the world found out that the famed would be could be isn’t psychic from TV commercials died at the young age of 53..
She was famous in the 1990s with her “call me now” tagline.. I recall her as I grew up on late night TV… the wee hours of the night for me were filled with many things. And at many points, the background noise of my youth was this woman’s voice..
As the New York TIMES reports.
But her fame also led to questions about her past. In 2002, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an investigation that revealed she had 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.
“She had no Jamaican accent — she was born and raised in L.A.,” a former cast mate told the paper. (A copy of a birth certificate posted by BuzzFeed in 2013 showed that Ms. Harris was indeed born in Los Angeles on Aug. 12, 1962.) Information on her survivors was not immediately available.
In 2002, the Psychic Readers Network and Access Resource Services were the subject of a federal lawsuit that ordered the companies to forgive $500 million in customer fees. The networks agreed to stop selling their services over the phone, and, according to the Federal Trade Commission, the companies agreed to pay a $5 million fine.
And with that, the star that was Miss Cleo failed to shine bright at night.
What makes me sad is that she was not Miss Cleo. She was a human being.
And today Harris died of cancer.