Yeah that's what I recall hearing too. Didn't get paid a whole lot for it either.

RIP sister.

She did. She basically was ripped off by the company she was scamming for (no way!) and never got paid most of what she claimed she was owed. Last I heard, she was not doing too well.

The accent was fake. Youree Dell Harris was originally born in Los Angeles, not Jamaica.

She also produced some plays before the psychic scam and voiced Auntie Poulet, the Haitian gang leader in Vice City, after the Cleo gig fell through.

And another piece of the '90s is dead.

yea, i remember that she did a video interview and i got all of my "lack-of-clairvoyance" jokes out then, so this just feels a bit more depressing

i'm beginning to think a lot of the nostalgia i have for her commercials is because it predates the godawful "Rx advertising" era, an unforgivable cultural sinkhole into which i feel the people responsible should be thrown (prior to being murdered for their fucking crimes of course)

LOL

The idea was to impress upon you that you were the only person who didn't know who Miss Cleo was.

Miss Cleo wasn't so much a character as a false identity, one of many this lady (her real name was Youree Harris) had established for herself. She would go around telling people she was born and raised by Rastafarian shamans in Trelawny, Jamaica, but it turns out she was actually just a plain old black American lady from Los Angeles. This company that she did all the ads for, and her promoters got sued out of business for fraud, false advertising, and deceptive billing and finance practices. Interestingly though, Cleo herself was never sued, so I'm guessing she either had a great lawyer, or none of it was her idea.