Ann Calvello, who died Tuesday at 76, was the greatest female villain in the curious and violent history of the Roller Derby.

Standing just five-foot six-inches and sporting wildly dyed hair that sometimes featured pink and purple polka dots, she had the temper of a wolverine and was capable of acts of astonishing violence on the banked skating track. It was routine for her to manhandle opponents and even to pummel referees. At one point she opened a nasty gash on the head of a soon-to-be-married opponent. Unapologetic to say the least, she henceforth referred to her victim as “Frankenstein’s bride.” It was not unknown for fans to get in on the action, too, and Calvello became a household name when a 60-year-old man ripped her shirt off in a nationally televised match in the early 1950s.

Such antics made her a cordially loathed figure in a sport that, like professional wrestling today, featured both villains and heroes. Calvello was so adept at her role that for much of her five-decade career, she was made a permanent visiting player no matter where she was skating.

In addition to the hair, she wore skating boots of mismatched colors, painted her nails to match her uniform, wore white lipstick, was tanned a deep mocha, and had multiple tattoos. In the 1950s, such body art qualified a woman for one job: the side show. Calvello’s outlandish appearance made her the perfect lightning rod for the barnstorming Roller Derby league.

Outside the ring she was – or at least attempted to be – a pussycat, a gentle devotee of astrology whose home was festooned with cat images (she was a Leo) and inhabited by numerous cats and featured an answering machine with a cat-oriented outgoing message. She liked to boast that she had five tattoos of cats, three of which could be seen when she was clothed.

In the 1980s, with Roller Derby in desuetude, she took a job with Kaiser Permanente, because she sensed that after decades of injuries – multiple fractures, cracked ribs, a nose that was broken a dozen times and left her with the nickname “banana nose” – she would be needing good health care. She was right, and in addition to her battle scars, she twice overcame brain cancer, including one bout that caused her to lose an eye. With typical insouciance, she planned to replace it with a prosthetic tiger’s eye. But the insurance company turned her request down. She died of liver cancer.

Calvello grew up a Navy brat, the eldest of six children, living at multiple postings. In 1941, when she was 12, they settled in Haight-Ashbury, then a neighborhood full of Navy families. She was a fun-loving tomboy, and roller-skated from age 6. When she was 18 and just out of high school, a recruiter found her at her local skating rink, and she joined a Roller Derby European tour. Later, in 1948, she joined the American Roller Derby, and before long was a star.

Calvello became the villain at least in part because of a rivalry that developed between her and another star of the sport, Joan Weston of the San Francisco Bombers, known as “The Blonde Bomber.” Weston was the good girl, Calvello her fiery opponent, sometimes called “Queen of the Penalty Box.” Ads for the league highlighted their matches, and they would sometimes have solo races: “5 laps ‘everything goes.'”

In 1952, Calvello married a Roller Derby referee and soon had a daughter. The marriage didn’t last, and she left her daughter with her ex-husband to rejoin the derby. (Her daughter and her long-term boyfriend survive her. She seemed to thrive on the barnstorming lifestyle, which included generating advance press. The players actually set up their banked tracks themselves.

By the early 1970s, Calvello was already anomalous for her longevity in the sport, and yet she kept skating into her 50s and 60s, occasionally making appearances for charity into the 1990s. Her showmanship was impeccable. Whenever she posed with teammates for a photo, she would bark, “Tickets Up! Stomachs In!” Tickets was what she called breasts, because she was convinced that sexy uniforms drew fans.

After retiring from her job as a janitor at Kaiser, Calvello worked as a bagger at her local supermarket. In an interview with the San Mateo County Times, she explained what happened to the adrenalin she used to generate with the Roller Derby.

“I have the most penalties in the whole history of Roller Derby. I’m aggressive in everything,” she said. “You should have seen me when I was bagging groceries at Safeway. I’ve got to be the best or one of the best in anything I do.”

A documentary about her life, “Demon of the Derby,” appeared in 2002.