hooker with a 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.