Well-established second lead and character player of film and TV with a long face and rugged, slightly uneven features. Wilson was studying architecture in college on a basketball scholarship when an injury forced him to leave school. Later, accepting a friend's bet to take an acting class, Wilson found a new career and began working on the LA stage. Cast in a supporting role in his feature debut, the Oscar-winning "In the Heat of the Night" (1967), Wilson later found out that "Heat" director Norman Jewison had screened dailies for Richard Brooks, who was planning to adapt Truman Capote's powerful and disturbing "In Cold Blood". And so, that same year, Wilson played his first leading role, and one of his best remembered parts in features, as one of two wandering gunmen (the other was Robert Blake) who suddenly slaughter an entire, innocent family.

Wilson subsequently played occasional leading roles in features, as in Robert Aldrich's violent, grim-humored kidnapping drama, "The Grissom Gang" (1971), which recalled Wilson's part in "In Cold Blood" more than a little. One of his more intriguing credits came with the first US-Polish co-production, Krzysztof Zanussi's acclaimed "The Year of the Quiet Sun" (1984), a love story between an American GI who doesn't speak Polish and a Polish woman who knows no English. Another interesting co-production, the US-Spanish "On the Line", came out that same year, with Wilson as one of two border guards who both become involved with a Mexican prostitute. For the most part, though, Wilson has played a wide variety of supporting roles, from George Wilson in "The Great Gatsby" (1974) to Governor Lew Wallace in "Young Guns II" (1990) and Elvis Presley's father in the TV biopic "Elvis and the Colonel: The Untold Story" (1993).