How it started
Early life and education
Royalle was born Candice Marion Vadala on October 15, 1950 to a working-class Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, Louis, worked as a professional jazz drummer and had a hot temper. Her mother, Peggy Frazier, left the family when Royalle was 18 months old and Royalle never saw her again. Candice and her sister Cinthea were raised by their stepmother, Helen Duffy.
Trained in music, dance and art in New York City, she studied at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design and the City College of New York.
Career
After graduating from the Parsons School of Design, she moved to California and began performing with the avant-garde theater group The Cockettes. In 1975, she played Divine's daughter in the play The Heartbreak of Psoriasis.
In 1975, she began her career as a pornographic performer, appearing in about 25 movies including Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls. Her final film was Blue Magic in 1980, which she also wrote. Royalle quit performing because she got married and was uncomfortable being sexual with other men. Moreover, she had increasingly felt that her strongly feminist views were at odds with the male-centric manner in which traditional pornography was produced and that she had been working in, giving virtually no attention to the female perspective, and making no effort to appeal to female viewers. The increasing availability of cable television and VCR around 1983 provided Royalle both with an incentive and opportunity to consider producing her own "feminist" pornography, aimed at women and couples who wanted to watch a different kind of porn from the privacy of their homes.
From Wikipedia’s article on Femme Productions, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2