Wayne Eagling was once the heart-throb of the ballet world.

As a principal of the Royal Ballet in the 1970s, he was famous for his energetic leaps and twists; enthralled students hung his poster on their bedroom walls.

After a long career in dance and choreography, he retired as artistic director of the English National Ballet in 2012.

The ballet master gave a group of lucky students an impromptu lesson at Jacksons School of Performing Arts last week.

The 64-year-old was on the Island for Hackers, a celebrity golf tournament.

For 45 minutes he adjusted arms, repositioned feet and gave advice to nervous-looking ballerinas.

Afterward, he admitted he hadn’t expected to teach a class.

“I thought I was just going to be talking with students,” he said good-naturedly. “To be honest, teaching isn’t my thing. I’ve been doing it all my life, but it’s not what I prefer.

“I end up working harder than the students. My real passion is choreography and coaching.”

It’s what he’s been doing for the past three years. Immediately before his trip to Bermuda he was in Hungary choreographing The Nutcracker for the Hungarian National Ballet; before that he was in Tokyo and Moscow.

Mr Eagling was born in Montreal, Canada, but moved to California with his family as a young child. He fell into dance, accidentally, at age 12.

“My sister was taking dance at the Patricia Ramsey Studio of Dance Arts,” he said. “The teacher wanted more boys in the school. I said, OK, but I’ll only take tap.”

Tap didn’t come to him naturally and ballet didn’t come naturally to his sister.

“My sister was a klutz,” he said with a laugh. “I ended up in the ballet class and found it easier than tap. She dropped out.”

He initially kept the lessons a secret from his friends. The classes were made easier as the teacher was pretty.

“She was very inspirational,” he said. “We would do anything for her. If she said, ‘Let’s go to a recital’, we went. If she had said, ‘Jump off a bridge’, we’d have done it.”

The teacher arranged to have him audition for The Royal Ballet. They were so impressed Mr Eagling was offered a scholarship to The Royal School of Ballet in London.

“I went the next year,” he said. “I was 15.”

In 1969, at 18, he joined The Royal Ballet and progressed quickly.

“In those days it took a long time to move up the ranks but the director liked me,” he said.

“I became one of the lucky new dancing stars. The way that I danced, they called me ‘American’. It was because I had very high legs. I could do the splits and jumps. A lot of the people liked the way I danced. The British style was a bit more refined. Ballet now is pretty much the same all around the world but in those days The Royal Ballet had its style, New York had its style and the Bolshoi had its. Now it is difficult to tell one from another.”

International choreography is keeping him very busy at the moment, Mr Eagling said.

“I did 20 years of running a big company of 70 or 80 dancers. It was a 24/7 kind of job. You would get no rest. You could never make everyone happy. It is stressful being a director because people tend to get upset when you have to pick people for roles.”

None of the students he saw at Jacksons were quite ready to audition for a job in New York, he said.

“They were of different skill levels. Some had been studying for only two years and some since they were three years old. At the school I went to in California, I was one of maybe seven or eight out of hundreds of kids that made a career of it.

“For most kids it is a great thing to do. It teaches body coordination and discipline. Most never go on to be ballet dancers.”

He is married to another ballet dancer, Monique. They have an eight-year-old son, Michael, who is primarily interested in computers, despite having perfectly turned dance feet.