She went bare naked for a series of ’70s skin flicks, and now Candida Royalle is baring her soul.
The cancer-stricken ex-porn-star is working on a documentary about her search for her birth mother, who left her when she was just 18 months old.
Royalle, 63, who lives on Long Island’s North Fork, told The Post she hoped that finding her mother would answer “a burning question for me’’ — why she was abandoned.
“Nothing replaces a mother’s love,” Royalle said, “and there is nothing worse than thinking your mother didn’t want you.”
Royalle, who has been battling stage III ovarian cancer for the past four years, found out about her birth mother with the help of a private detective, but says she doesn’t want to reveal any details yet. She’s saving that for her planned documentary — “While You Were Gone: The Untold Story of Candida Royalle,” for which she is raising money online.
Royalle — who spoke on condition her real name not be revealed because she’s been stalked — was raised in New York City by her dad and stepmother, who both died more than a decade ago. She trained as a dancer before moving to San Francisco, where she was working as a nude model when she got offered a part in a porn movie.
Initially insulted, she changed her mind after visiting a film set, going on to appear in about two dozen X-rated movies from the so-called Golden Age of Porn, including “Thoroughly Amorous Amy,” “Kinky Tricks” and “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.”
She later stepped behind the camera to direct with her Femme Productions, which specializes in “female-centric erotic cinema” that’s less graphic than traditional porn.
Royalle also penned the 2006 book “How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do: Sex Advice from a Woman Who Knows” and has given lectures on sexuality.
But Royalle kept secret the trauma that’s haunted her since childhood.
“When you grow up without even a memory, it’s like she wasn’t even real,” Royalle said of her mother. “There wasn’t a birthday that went by that I didn’t think of her.”
The onetime porn princess said she first tried to locate her mother about 10 years ago, without any success. But this past spring, she hired a detective who quickly solved the mystery, and also found her long-lost half-brother and uncle, as well as a half-sister she didn’t know existed.
As of Sunday, a Kickstarter campaign by documentary director Sheona McDonald had raised about $43,000 to finance the movie.