My parents enrolled me in a ballet class when I was in kindergarten and from the age of 13 I attended the Arts Educational School. This wonderful school provided training in singing, acting and all kinds of dance. I did tap, modern dance, character dance and ballet. It was ballet, ballet, ballet for me and my ambition was to become a ballerina.

We did acting competitions in school and outside adjudicators would judge our performances. I used to do much better in the drama than the ballet adjudications.

My dance teachers included Anne Heaton, the very famous ex-ballerina, and Ben Stevenson, who now works as the artistic director at Texas Ballet Theatre in the US. He got an OBE the same time I did in 2000. Mr Stevenson and Mrs Heaton taught me how to really sell my dance, in other words, how to bring the emotion into it, while an extraordinary woman called Eve Pettinger taught me technique. It’s very hard for me to pick a favourite teacher, but Miss Pettinger was there from beginning to end, having taught me for three or four years from the age of 13, so I have to give her credit.

Miss Pettinger had enormous patience with everyone, but she was very strict. If you weren’t in class, warmed up and ready to do the bar 10 minutes before the class started, she would give you a disparaging look and then close the door on you. From then until this day, I am always 10 or 15 minutes early for everything and that was Miss Pettinger’s influence. A lot of people have told me I am incredibly disciplined and that they appreciate my willingness to push myself to the limits. I am this way because of the training I received from Miss Pettinger.

Striking a pose

Miss Pettinger used to pull our hair from the top of our head, so that we could balance. To this day, if I want to strike a balletic pose and balance, I do an “Eve Pettinger” on myself. Then all of a sudden my head is straight, my legs are straight and my spine is straight.

I wasn’t built right for ballet because I had flat feet and wasn’t very supple, but because I loved it so much, Miss Pettinger never gave up on me. She never said to me “You shouldn’t be doing this”, which is probably what she should have said, because it was a fact. Instead, she encouraged my ambition and kept saying: “Keep trying, keep trying. Try it this way, try it that way.” Thanks to Miss Pettinger, I managed to perform ballet in The Nutcracker at the London Festival.

She had been a student at the Arts Educational School, too, and she appreciated my situation because she wasn’t built as the perfect ballerina either, but she was probably one of the greatest ballet teachers around. I so respect people who are teachers, who actually want to be teachers. Miss Pettinger loves being a teacher, that is her passion. At school, she was never trying to be a performer. Her talent, drive and passion in life was to teach and to help as many people as she possibly could. That was her greatest attribute.

At school, she was never trying to be a performer. Her talent was to teach

I ended up dancing professionally for quite a while after leaving school. Imagine then how devastated I was when I injured my knees and could no longer do ballet. The injury occurred because I am not built for that form of dance. Having said this, it has been an amazing groundwork for everything I have done in my life. I did Dancing with the Stars (the American version of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing) a number of years ago and when I was training in ballroom, which is not something I had ever done, I kept thinking of what Miss Pettinger had taught me. I got into the last five and could never have achieved this without the training I had.

The last time I saw Miss Pettinger a few years ago, I couldn’t believe that she still had so much energy and had aged so well. She was just the same person that she had always been, but with grey hair. She has an MBE and still teaches at the Arts Educational School.

Jane Seymour was talking to Adeline Iziren. She appears in television series Hooten and the Lady, which is available to buy now on DVD