While the film Billy Elliot was drawing huge crowds at the cinema yesterday, and expected to break first-weekend box office records, the real life inspiration for the heart-warming story was at a Royal Ballet gala - and looking back on his own arabesque from northern backstreets to Covent Garden.

In the case of the Royal Ballet star Philip Mosley it was Barnsley rather than Billy's north-east, and the thumping rhythm of The Jam's A Town Called Malice had to be in his own small head rather than on Dolby cinema speakers.

But the film's key, exhilarating sequence in which the miner's son pirouettes and leaps his way through the cobbled streets with sheer love of dance, came straight from Mosley's briefings to the screenwriter Lee Hall.

"It was dead-on - how could I forget it," said Mosley's mother, Margaret, who was machine-seaming tights for Marks & Spencer when her son was skipping rings round his twin brother, Paul, on the way back from Cudworth junior. "I was chatting to our Philip this morning," she said yesterday. "And we were going over how really close they got that bit and the part where he taps down the street."

Philip remembers how dreams of being Barnsley's answer to Gene Kelly go back "as long as I can remember. There was almost nothing but mining round my village, but my family were very supportive all the way through." He half-ran, half-toddled to dancing class alongside his older sister Anita, whose own daughter Melissa was having her usual Sunday morning with Grandma yesterday.

In the film Billy Elliot pretends he's at boxing while he slips into the girls' ballet class, fearful of his dad's very vocal disapproval. Mosley never hid his passion. His mother said: "He wasn't even three but he went on at me about going with her. I tells him: 'Lads don't go to dancing class' but he was just a bit persistent. So I asks the teacher, Rosalind Wicks, if she takes lads and she jumped at him. She says: 'We certainly do, if we can ever get them'."

Mosley was ribbed at school but protected by three older brothers, including Michael, the only one of the seven children to follow both grandfathers down Darfield Main pit.

Unlike Billy's father in the film, who was initially furious at his youngest son's desire to play "girls'" games, Mosley's dad, Albert, a plumber, was not averse to dance. He and Margaret had seen the South Yorkshire town caught by dance fever at a crucial time in their own lives.

"Everyone remembers the maple floorboards they put across the swimming baths in Race Street," said Annie Storey, a Barnsley local historian who made the famous London Tiller girls in the 1950s. "There was always an extra spring in the dance floor because it wasn't solid underneath. There was one young man who used to go dancing at the baths who had a variety of brightly coloured suits - very vivid, not unlike Showaddywaddy."

It wasn't exactly a tradition, but it gave a bit of history to men gambolling about in a tough mining community. When Philip was nine, two friends joined him at dancing class and when he was entered for a free scholarship to the Royal Ballet's school in White Lodge, Richmond Park, south-west London, the neighbours celebrated heartily.

Mrs Mosley, now retired like her husband, said: "Philip had been doing it so long, that no one really gave it a second thought. They'd come round to our house, just a terrace then though we've got three bedrooms now, and say: 'How's the lad doing?' Everyone knew that Albert was always finding time between jobs to run him around to classes or performances, and there were real celebrations when he got in."

Philip, now 33, is a first artist with the Royal Ballet and his roles have included Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He recalled White Lodge as having an unexpectedly wide social mix. "Though I did keep quiet about my mother working in a factory." He was also on the phone to Cudworth a lot at first, homesick at the age of only 12 and in novel and competitive, rather than cosy, surroundings.

"I always said to him: 'Philip, you can come home any time you want to'," said Margaret, who shares with Albert, 68, a democratic pride that all their children - another plumber, a joiner, an electrician, a hairdresser, a mother and housewife and a mobile phone company executive - "have found themselves a trade." But she added: "I never thought Philip'd give up for a moment. He was that keen to dance. I knew he'd keep at it and he did."

When the Mosleys now pay their annual visit to Covent Garden, dancing takes on 'n extra dimension for their son, who said: "I think of what they gave up to put me through, and I do get quite emotional, because I know my mum's trying to tell everyone in the whole row, 'That's my son up there'."

His mother echoed: "We are very proud of him. We're glad he didn't have to go through everything Billy Elliot had to face."