Candida Royalle

Candice Marion Vadala was born in New York and attended the Parsons School of New York and the City University of New York. She worked in various office jobs during school and also did some nude modeling for the easy money.

In the early 1970’s she decided to relocate to the more liberal-minded city of San Francisco where she became active in the avant-garde theatre scene, performing with the infamous Cockettes, the Angels of Light and the late Divine. And she started singing in jazz clubs.

She got involved in doing porn films because she was uninhibited and, again, it was easy money. She had scenes with most of the leading male pornstars of the era (John Holmes, John Leslie, Paul Thomas, Mike Ranger). As she said in an interview, she could spend a week shooting a porn flick and have enough money to live on for a few months.

She got married in 1984 and stopped performing in pornographic films.

In 1984, Royalle founded Femme Productions, with the goal of making erotica based on female desire, as well as pornographic films aimed at aiding couples therapy. Her productions were aimed more to women and couples than to the standard pornographic audience of men, and have been praised by counselors and therapists for depicting healthy and realistic sexual activity. Her company has been very successful, producing a series of products known to have a more artistic touch, lacking some aspects of common porn, like a focus on male ejaculation. She described her approach to film-making in an interview in the Wendy McElroy 1995 book, XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography. Royalle said she tries to avoid "misogynous predictability," and depiction of sex in "...as grotesque and graphic [a way] as possible." She also criticizes the male-centredness of the typical pornographic film, in which scenes end when the male actor ejaculates. Royalle’s films are not “goal oriented” towards a final "cum shot". Instead, her films depict sexual activity within the broader context of women's emotional and social lives.

In 1989, she signed the Post Porn Modernist Manifesto.

Royalle is also a member of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, and a founding board-member of Feminists for Free Expression. She recently made her mission of women's sexual empowerment multi-cultural by executive producing the independent film Afrodite Superstar, directed by African American director Venus Hottentot, a breakthrough film nominated for seven AVN Awards in 2007. Royalle is credited with also directing the explicit sex scenes, one of which features her Natural Contours products.

Royalle is one of twenty-five women of the golden era of adult films featured in the 2012 book by author Jill C. Nelson titled: Golden Goddesses: 25 Legendary Women of Classic Erotic Cinema, 1968-1985 published by BearManor Media.