Hooker with a heart of gold
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- This article is about Hookers with hearts of gold. For other uses, see Heart of gold.
The hooker with a heart of gold (also the whore with a heart of gold or the tart with a heart) is a stock character in which a fallen woman, a prostitute who sells sex for cash or drugs, is in fact a kindly and internally wholesome person. This character is often a pivotal, but peripheral, character in literature and motion pictures, usually giving key advice or serving as a go-between. She is sometimes established in contrast to another female character who is morally perfect but frigid or otherwise unyielding. Hookers with hearts of gold are usually reluctant prostitutes selling their bodies due to either desperation or coercion from a pimp. The stereotype owes something of a debt to certain mistaken traditions surrounding the figure of Mary Magdalene and is pervasive enough in myth and culture that it might be considered an archetype.
A variation on the theme, the stripper with a heart of gold, is a tamer version of the character, in that a stripper is a sex worker but not a prostitute.
In opera and musical theatre a hooker with a heart of gold is most often potrayed by a mezzo-soprano. The hooker with a heart of gold is potrayed in a tragic light and often times dies a tragic death.
In television history, the "tart with a heart" has become an important archetype in serial drama and Soap Opera, especially in Britain. During the 1960s, the character of Elsie Tanner in British series Coronation Street set the mould for future characters such as Bet Lynch (Also Coronation Street) and Kat Slater (EastEnders). Characters of this nature are often depicted as having tragic lives, but put on a front when in public to create the illusion of happiness. More often than not, these female characters are vital to their respective shows, and inevitably become some of the biggest stars in British Television.
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[edit] Examples
- Aldonza (Sophia Loren) in Man of La Mancha'
- Bianca in Othello
- Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire
- Chocolate Treat from The Liam Smith Show
- Donna Beck on All My Children
- Erin Grant(Demi Moore) in Striptease is a stripper with a heart of gold
- Fantine in Les Misérables
- Goldie in Sin City
- Jane Bainter in the song "Jane Says" by Jane's Addiction
- Joe Buck (Jon Voight) in Midnight Cowboy is a male prostitute with a heart of gold.
- Nancy in Oliver Twist
- Nandi (Melinda Clarke) and her girls, in a Firefly episode entitiled "Heart of Gold" (but not Inara Serra, who is considered to be a very respectable woman thanks to her status as a Registered Companion).
- Rahab from the Bible
- Rekha in Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Umrao Jaan and some other Bollywood movies
- Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman.
[edit] Parodies/Jokes
- In the Futurama episode "Hell is Other Robots," Fry says that the robotic Hookerbot has a heart of solid gold.
- The newspaper gag from the American Dad! episode "Francine's Flashback" is "Hooker Killed for Heart of Gold."
- An episode of Kids in the Hall featured a scene with a man looking for a "hooker with a heart of gold". Another prostitute directs him to one, but makes him pledge that he will pay her (since she's always giving out freebies).
- In an episode of The Simpsons, Bart incorrectly refers to Erin Brockovich as the "prostitute with a heart of gold", referring to Julia Roberts' portrayal both of Erin Brockovich and of Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman
[edit] References
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