Elizabeth Taylor Was Injecting Pain Meds Before Death: Icon's Son Reveals His Pain Over Her Final Days — and How Family Staged Desperate Drink and Drugs Intervention

Elizabeth Taylor's family did their best to help her curb her addiction to drugs and alcohol.

In the final episode of Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar, which aired Friday, October 11, on the BBC, the Hollywood icon's son Christopher Wilding revealed that her loved ones staged an intervention to help her, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

Following the demise of her marriage to Senator John Warner in 1982, Taylor, who passed away in 2011, began to struggle.

"She had physical ailments, especially bad back problems, for which the use of pain meds was a legitimate recourse," the 69-year-old, whose father is Michael Wilding, recalled. "When she was little, we had all these miracle drugs and you took a pill. That was her approach — better living through science."

Yet the people around her could see she was "abusing alcohol and pain meds, including injectable ones."

"We’d talk to her, but things got to the point where it was decided an intervention would be necessary," Christopher said. "We just wanted her to get help. Close family members flew in and boy, that was difficult.”

In a recording, the Cat on a Hot Tin Roof actress recalled of the terrifying moment: "The family intervention stopped me so dead in my tracks. It leaves you totally speechless, and it’s so sincere and done with such love that you know it must be agony for them.”

"It was like being slapped in the face with reality. And I thought, ‘My God, I thought I was a good mother. How have I allowed myself to do this to the people I love most in the world?'" she said in the tape.

Elizabeth's inner circle did their best to keep her safe from people who wanted to take advantage of her stardom. "We were all petrified. She was a formidable woman," Christopher emphasized about his mom.

When the A Little Night Music actress arrived at the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment, the red carpet wasn't exactly rolled out for her. "She had to do a lot of things she never had to do in her adult life," Christopher noted. "She had to share a room with a stranger. Everyone was assigned kind of life, domestic chores."

While she had to roll up her sleeves to do housework, Elizabeth also underwent therapy. "I felt really for the first time in my life like I wasn't being exploited by anyone," the star explained in a recording. "I was being accepted for myself. I was forced to look at the honest truth of who I was."

When Elizabeth was released from rehab, she leaned on her family for support. "She lived in everyone’s home. We witnessed her suffering and maybe that did have power too. She shared that suffering with us," former daughter-in-law Aileen Getty, who was married to Christopher for nearly ten years, said.

"If she hadn’t have gone public, the chances are it would have leaked to the press anyway," she noted. "That’s when I think there was a real switch that flicked on, like, ‘Actually, better to be the one that puts it out to the world so that you control the narrative.'"