Peta Gia Wilson (born 18 November 1970) is an Australian actress and model. She is best known as Nikita in the television series La Femme Nikita.
Early life
Wilson was born in Sydney on 18 November 1970. She is 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.
Peta Wilson with Jack Nicholson and Vladimir Putin in 2001
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, based on 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, and another 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 2002–3 during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. She played the 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 lived with her long-time boyfriend Damian Harris from the mid-1990s until their separation in 2002. They are the parents of one son, Marlowe Harris, who was born in February 2002. Currently she is single.
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