Mae Young — make that the Great Mae Young — who pulled hair and took cheap shots, who preferred actually fighting to pretending, who was, by her own account and that of many other female wrestlers, the greatest and dirtiest of them all, died on Tuesday in Columbia, S.C. She was 90, and her last round in the ring was in 2010.

Her death was confirmed by World Wrestling Entertainment.

“She just was a rough, tough broad,” Ella Waldek, another early wrestler, who died last year, once put it.

Stories of her fierceness followed Ms. Young into her first professional match, in 1939. She had learned to wrestle with boys on her high school team in Oklahoma, and played football with them, too.

In professional wrestling, there are baby faces and heels, and she never doubted which one she would be.