Choosing the right name for a child is a difficult job. Inspiration can come from popular culture or from family, but for Judi Dench’s parents it came from a chance meeting with a medium.

The Oscar-winning actress has recalled the story ahead of the release of Blithe Spirit, a major screen adaptation of Noël Coward’s masterly comedy about the afterlife, ghosts and a love that just won’t die.

Dench, who plays the eccentric medium Madame Arcati, said her belief in the afterlife stems from the story of her name.

“A very strange thing happened at the time that I was born. My father was a doctor, my mother was from Dublin, and they lived in York. There was a famous medium. My father met her a day after I was born. She said to him, ‘I’m very pleased to hear about Judith.’ My parents had no idea what I would be called and so I was called Judith which – fortunately – now I’m never called.”

Dench, who was born in December 1934, added: “There was great belief in the 1930s in mediums. They toured and people went to the shows.I think it’s difficult for us to say that there is nothing. There is a huge world that we don’t know about. I implicitly believe that, because all sorts of things have happened to me.”

Blithe Spirit, released this month, introduces audiences to Madame Arcati at just such a spiritual theatrical show. Set in the 1930s, it tells the story of bestselling crime novelist Charles Condomine, who is struggling to write his first screenplay.

Inspiration comes after he sees Madame Arcati’s show on whether there is life after death. He invites her to conduct a séance at his house – only for her to cause utter chaos. She accidentally conjures up the ghost of his irritating first wife, Elvira, who is unaware that she has been dead for years while haunting him and his second wife, Ruth, in a deadly love triangle. The wives are played by Leslie Mann and Isla Fisher.

Dench joked about her own afterlife: “I don’t know who I’d haunt. I might haunt places. I might drift a lot around in Scotland because I love it so much.”

Dench is one of Britain’s most revered actresses, whose roles have ranged from monarchs to M in the Bond films. In an interview recorded by the film-makers, she said: “Being asked to play Madame Arcati is kind of a dream come true. In our adaptation, she doesn’t just come in for a couple of scenes – she goes on a bit and causes even more chaos, but subsequently has a really wonderful part to play.”

The actress recalled the thrill of meeting Coward through her friends Joe Mitchenson and Raymond Mander, actors who founded a world-famous theatre collection: “As a young actress, they took me to see everything in London when I wasn’t playing at the Old Vic. One night we saw, at the Savoy theatre, an adaptation of a Coward play. Afterwards, they said we’re going round to see somebody… ‘Here’s Noël’. He shook hands with me. I will never forget the smell of his aftershave. I don’t think I washed for days. It was just magical.”

She said of the new film: “I hope audiences will have a lovely time and have a laugh and be transported for a bit so that they can forget the things they’re worried about, like Brexit.”

It is directed by Edward Hall, former artistic director of the Hampstead theatre in London, whose hits included Sunny Afternoon, the Kinks musical that was also a huge West End success, winning multiple Olivier awards.

His father was the late Sir Peter Hall, the famed director who headed the National Theatre and founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, casting Dench in productions such as Antony and Cleopatra.

She said: “What is wonderful about working with Ed is that I met his father in 1962. It is just glorious working with Ed now. I keep saying to him, ‘You are so like your father’. And he has a talent like Peter too.”

She added: “It’s so strange, in Blithe Spirit – where you see ghosts of people – in a way I see, well, more than a ghost of Peter in Ed.”

The writer-producers, Nick Moorcroft and Meg Leonard, have adapted Blithe Spirit with Piers Ashworth, having made some of Britain’s most successful independent films, including Fisherman’s Friends and Finding Your Feet.

Leonard said: “Judi is one of the great, iconic actresses of our time… It was a real joy watching [her] bring her own magic and mischief to the role of Madame Arcarti and we’re sure audiences will agree.”

When Britain was in the grip of the second world war, a staging of Blithe Spirit, a comedy about death, was considered a risk. But it turned out to be a great success.

Alan Brodie of the Coward estate said: “Coward wrote it to distract audiences from the awful time they were having. It seems so apt now that the film can do the same.”

He added: “What the writers have done really well is manage to keep the wit of Coward, but at same time bring a modern comic feel to it. It doesn’t feel old-fashioned although it’s set in the period. That’s really hard to pull off.”

• Blithe Spirit will be released by Sky Original in cinemas and on Sky Cinema from 15 January. An exhibition, Noël Coward: Art & Style, that will feature two costumes from the film, is at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London, from 14 January: guildhall-art-gallery.arttickets.org.uk/