A flame of American 90s childhood went out on Tuesday with the death of Miss Cleo, the famous infomercial tarot card clairvoyant with the turbans, faux Jamaican accent and over-the-top dramas she solved with her tarot cards.

Miss Cleo, real name Youree Dell Cleomili Harris, died in Palm Beach, Florida on Tuesday, aged 53. She had been battling colon cancer.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Harris’ television ads – where she implored people to “call me now for your free tarot card reading” (a claim that later saw her and the business she worked sued for fraud) made her famous. In those decades, it wasn’t uncommon for celebrities – including Hulk Hogan and New Kids on the Block – to have call-in numbers, but Miss Cleo’s ads became a cultural phenomenon of their own.

She offered no-nonsense advice to those with relationship issues, claiming to see the truth of what they were doing in her cards. When a caller asked for guidance on whether to go out of town with a lover, Miss Cleo replied:

“Who asked you to go out of town, the stupid young one or the married one? That’s what I thought. Don’t go, you hear me ... I’m trying to help you avoid the heartache.”

“The cards can reveal things that you never see by yourself,” she claimed.

In 2002, the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against Psychic Readers Network, the company Harris worked for, claiming it had made $1bn with “deceptive advertising” for claiming the calls were free.

But Harris wasn’t the owner of the company, and was dropped from the suit.

Although Harris’ patois accent was a critical part of her television persona (“De cards don’t lie” became her tag-line) she later said it was put-on and that she was born in Los Angeles to middle class immigrant parents.

“I speak perfect English. 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,” she told Vice magazine in 2014.

And despite being dubbed clairvoyant, Harris also said she never claimed to be one, and instead studied voodoo under a Haitian mambo for 30 years.

“So they refer to me as psychic – because the word voodoo scares just about everybody. So they told me, ‘No, no, no, we can’t use that word; we’re going to call you a psychic.’ I said, ‘But I’m not a psychic!’” she told Vice.

“I’m more a shaman, an elder in a community who has visions and gives direction to people in their village. My clients and my students are my village. I take care of this community. If you sit down at my table, you have to take away a lesson and not just learn what is going to happen tomorrow. I also perform weddings – both gay and straight marriages – and house cleansings and blessings,” she said in an interview with Advocate magazine.

In 2006, Harris revealed she was a lesbian in an interview with Advocate magazine, inspired by her gay teenage godson to come out. She told Advocate she had two daughters and had been in long-term marriages with women (and a two-year marriage with a man, from ages 19 to 21).

She continued to work as a voice artist, appearing as a Miss Cleo-like character, Auntie Poulet, in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

And despite the legal dramas and the claims that she was fake, Harris said fans who grew up watching her still always got excited to spot Miss Cleo. As she told The Advocate:

“If I’m standing in line somewhere and I’m talking, someone will whip their head around and look at me. People give me mad love, sweetheart. They’ll say, ‘Do you see anything? Where do we find you? When are you coming back? We miss you.’ I get a lot of love.”