Candida Royalle

Candida Royalle (born Candice Marion Vadala in Brooklyn; died September 7, 2015) was an adult film actress of the 1970s who in 1984 founded Femme Productions to produce "adult films from a woman's perspective." She died of ovarian cancer at her home in Mattituck, New York, at 64.¹

Career

Royalle performed in the mid-1970s in San Francisco and appeared in adult films including Thoroughly Amorous Amy and Fascination before moving to writing, producing and directing.¹² Femme Productions released 18 films between 1984 and 2007, 13 of them directed by Royalle; its best known included Three Daughters (1986) and Sensual Escape (1991). Two others, Lovers (1993) and Lovers 2 (1994), were directed by R.C. Horsch under the name "RC Hürsch."²³ In the 1990s she arranged distribution of Femme titles through the adult-goods company Adam and Eve, with a line of vibrators. Her 1992 film Revelations she described as "my response to the right-wing attacks on the adult industry."² According to the performer Annie Sprinkle, she co-founded Club 90, a support group of adult film performers, in about 1985.¹

Free Expression

In 1992 she founded, according to Reason, or was a founding member of, according to The Suffolk Times, Feminists for Free Expression, a nonprofit that opposed censorship legislation and defended free speech in courts, on campuses and in the press.¹² Femme was founded, Reason noted, at the time Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were testifying to legislators that pornography was abusive by nature. Royalle wrote How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do (2004) and in 2014 received a doctorate in human sexuality from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.¹²