Elizabeth Taylor’s son, Christopher Wilding, revealed that his mother’s struggles with addiction required urgent intervention and specialized care in a documentary episode aired Friday.
Wilding spoke candidly about his late mother’s abuse of pain medications in the final episode of “Elizabeth Taylor: Rebel Superstar,” a documentary series released by the BBC. He said that the legendary actress turned to pain meds to address “physical ailments” and those closest to Taylor said she was “abusing alcohol and pain meds, including injectable ones,” according to People.
British-born American actress Elizabeth Taylor (1932 – 2011), circa 1960. (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)
Taylor’s son said his mother had initially used the medications for legitimate reasons.
“She had physical ailments, especially bad back problems, for which the use of pain meds was a legitimate recourse,” Wilding explained. “When she was little, we had all these miracle drugs and you took a pill. That was her approach—better living through science.”
Wilding said Taylor suffered greatly following the end of her marriage with Sen. John Warner in 1982.
“We’d talk to her, but things got to the point where it was decided an intervention would be necessary,” he said, according to the outlet. “We just wanted her to get help. Close family members flew in and boy, that was difficult.”
Elizabeth Taylor appears at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert, Wembley Stadium, London, 20th April 1992. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)
The documentary included video clips of Taylor herself opening up about her personal life.
“The family intervention stopped me so dead in my tracks,” Taylor said in one clip, according to the outlet. “It leaves you totally speechless, and it’s so sincere and done with such love that you know it must be agony for them.”
Wilding admitted it was difficult for him to confront his mother about her addiction problems.
“We were all petrified. She was a formidable woman,” Wilding said.
Actress Elizabeth Taylor and her groom, Conrad “Nickie” Hilton, Jr. in the limousine that will take them to their wedding reception at the Bel-Air Country Club, following their marriage at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills. (Getty Images)
“It was like being slapped in the face with reality,” Taylor said in a clip. “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?’”
Taylor agreed to seek professional help at the Betty Ford Clinic, where she “had to do a lot of things she never had to do in her adult life,” Wilding said. (RELATED: Hollywood Stars Come Forward To Expose Celebrity Drug Ring: REPORT)
“She had to share a room with a stranger. Everyone was assigned kind of life, domestic chores,” he said.
“I felt really for the first time in my life like I wasn’t being exploited by anyone. I was being accepted for myself. I was forced to look at the honest truth of who I was,” the late actress said.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
