He had Olympic athletic ability, movie-star good looks, romanced with royalty, held some of the most senior positions in the Government of Canada and was married to the love of his life for 57 years.

John Napier Turner, Canada’s 17th prime minister, died Friday night at the age of 91.

Turner died in his sleep at home, according to long-serving staffer and friend of the Turner family Marc Kealey.

“He was even better looking than Kennedy,” longtime aid and friend Ray Heard said Saturday.

When Turner entered the political world in 1962, his dashing good looks saw comparisons made to Kennedy. As for that romance with royalty, that happened in 1958 when Princess Margaret toured Canada and visited Vancouver.

“Princess Margaret sat in the moonlight last night in an intimate tête-à-tête with a young bachelor-lawyer … at a secluded table on the lawn of the HMCS Discovery naval base,” the Toronto Telegram reported about their meeting.

The romance was stopped by order of Buckingham Palace, perhaps in part due to Turner’s Catholicism.

In 1963, Turner would marry the love of his life, Geills McCrae Kilgour, and went on to have four children — Elizabeth, David, Michael and James.

Turner was a student athlete, Rhodes scholar who ran track with Sir Roger Bannister at Oxford, and worked at a prestigious Montreal law firm before entering politics in the 1962 election. He entered cabinet immediately and never left until he exited politics for the first time in 1975.

Under Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, Turner served as minister of corporate and consumer affairs, minister of justice and minister of finance. He spearheaded the push for a national legal aid system across the country, oversaw the suspension of civil liberties during the 1970 October Crisis and was minister of finance during the 1973 oil crisis.

He resigned from cabinet and politics after Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals had run against wage and price controls during the 1974 election and then tried to institute them in 1975. Despite claims he and Trudeau were bitter rivals and hated each other, Kealey says that wasn’t true.