Deidre Gillard-Rowlings is a Canadian film, television, and stage actress, who is best known for her role as Nurse Myra Bennett in Robert Chafe's Tempting Providence and for her work at the Stratford Festival. History Originally from the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, Gillard-Rowlings grew up in the small communities of Englee and Main Brook. In 2014, she told a local newspaper that growing up in a “remote, beautiful and stark place with a lot of space to think, dream and create” had a profound impact on her life in theatre. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Memorial University of Newfoundland (Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Campus), making the Principal's Honor List for 1990. She graduated in 1994, as part of Grenfell's third graduating class. Following graduation, she founded, with her classmates, Bare Boards Theatre with a mandate to create contemporary theatre with spartan and inventive methods. Bare Boards Theatre is a volunteer-based company, organized by Grenfell Theatre graduates. She owns a piece of property in Gros Morne National Park which she is developing as a skills collective. In 2019, she received the Helen Creighton Folklore Society Grants-in-Aid for her work interviewing two traditional Newfoundland weavers. In March 2021, it was announced that she had won the 2020 ArtsNL Rhonda Payne Theatre Award. Tempting Providence Tempting Providence, produced by Theatre Newfoundland Labrador and written by playwright Robert Chafe, tells the story of Myra Bennett, "a woman who travelled to Canada to become one of the first outport nurses on the isolated Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, and became a legend for performing a variety of medical tasks, from delivering babies to setting bones to extracting teeth." Growing up in Newfoundland, Gillard-Rowlings remembered her grandparents telling her about the legendary outport nurse:"My grandmother ran a private clinic and so I heard lots of stories about Myra and I even drove by her house twice but I never met her," she said from her home in Newfoundland. "By all accounts, Myra was a really, really driven woman with strong Christian beliefs, who was very selfless yet stern and strict she had that British stiff upper lip. She would often say she wasn't there to make friends but rather to help the sick." From 2002–2012, Gillard-Rowlings toured nationally and internationally with the production, performing the role of Myra Bennett over 622 times. With the project since its inception, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings brought Nurse Bennett