ATHENS — Leonardo DiCaprio’s face glowed triumphantly from a large billboard here atop the Athinaion, an old movie theater where “The Wolf of Wall Street” was recently playing. Mr. DiCaprio had just been nominated for an Oscar, and Vasilis Dimitriou had painted him larger than life, with a gleaming gold statuette against a sea of red and black brush strokes.

The look was vintage movie poster, bordering on 1940s noir, imbuing Mr. DiCaprio with a mysterious allure befitting Humphrey Bogart back in the day.

Mr. Dimitriou, 78, has never met a Hollywood star, but he has painted thousands of them. Nearly every week since the age of 15, he has immortalized legends of the screen in dreamlike friezes of love, anger, pride or temptation — often deftly, sometimes not, but always with flair.

Heroes are depicted as if from the pages of a comic book in a moody haze of luminescence and shadow, with an atmosphere that flits between reality and fantasy. The romanticized images evoke an earlier age of celluloid, movie magazines and cigarette-smoking starlets, incongruous in an age of DVDs and downloads, digital marquees and movies on demand.