Wilson was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. She was the daughter of the caterer Karlene White Wilson and Darcy Wilson, a former warrant officer in the Australian Army She spent several years in Papua New Guinea when her father was stationed there. Her parents' marriage came to an end in 1982.

Wilson worked first as a model in Australia and in Europe, before she moved to Los Angeles in 1991 to study acting with Arthur Mendoza at the Actors Circle Theatre and with Tom Waits at the TomKat Repertory Group. After some education in acting, Wilson was hired for some small roles in independent films, such as in Loser and in One of Our Own. Then in 1996, Wilson was preparing to continue her studies at an acting school in New York City, but she decided to audition first for a new television show to be produced for the USA cable TV channel in North America. From a field of just over 200 aspiring actresses who auditioned for the starring role, the new program's producers chose to offer the job to Wilson, and she accepted. This new show was called La Femme Nikita, one which was based upon the French movie Nikita. Each episode was one hour long, and the series was produced by a combination of Canadian and American companies. The show ran for five years and 96 episodes on the USA network. There were 22 episodes per season for four years, but just eight episodes in its fifth and final TV year. Most of the episodes of La Femme Nikita were filmed in and around the city of Toronto, Ontario.

Wilson's co-stars in this TV series were the actors Roy Dupuis, Don Francks, Alberta Watson and Eugene Robert Glazer, and for her acting in La Femme Nikita, Wilson was nominated twice for the annual Gemini Award for "Best Performance by An Actress in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role", though she did not win.

In 2001 Wilson took part in the International Film Festival in Moscow, where she met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who confessed to being a fan of hers.

In the realm of major motion pictures, Wilson collaborated with the Scottish actor Sean Connery in 2002 - 03 during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In this one she played ther role of the vampire Mina Harker, and Connery played Allan Quatermain. She also portrayed real-life actress Anny Ondra in the television movie "Joe and Max" (2002).

During 2006, Wilson had a small role in the movie Superman Returns as the character "Bobbie-Faye", a spokeswoman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States.

Wilson has been living with her long-time boyfriend Damian Harris since the mid-1990s. They are the parents of one son, Marlowe Harris, who was born in February 2002.