Wilson was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the son of Georges Wilson, who was an actor, theatrical manager and director of the Theatre National de Paris. Wilson screen tested for The Living Daylights (1987) for the role of James Bond, appearing in test footage opposite Maryam D'Abo (the Bond girl in The Living Daylights) as Tatiana Romanova, re-enacting scenes from From Russia with Love (1963). Wilson was also featured in a series of Calvin Klein ads featuring Christy Turlington for Eternity in 1991, as well as a poster ad for Eternity in 1998. Wilson released the album Musicals on the EMI label in 2004, with John McGlinn conducting Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. It features him singing songs of the American Musical Theatre catalogue, those well-known ("Maria" from West Side Story, "There but for You Go I" from Lerner & Loewe's Brigadoon, "The Cafe Song" from Les Misérables, "Johanna" from Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd), rare ("Love Song" from Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's Love Life, "It Must Be So" from Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and "Silly People", which was cut from Sondheim's A Little Night Music), and those in-between ("Finishing the Hat" from Sunday in the Park with George, "You Do Something to Me" from Cole Porter's Fifty Million Frenchmen, "Never Will I Marry" from Frank Loesser's Greenwillow). He has directed stage presentations of Alfred de Musset's Les Caprices de Marianne starring Laure Marsac at Paris' Bouffes du Nord as well as Racine's Bérénice starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Didier Sandre at Avignon then Chaillot.