Phyllis Huffman, a veteran casting director whose long collaboration with filmmaker Clint Eastwood included work on “Unforgiven” and “Million Dollar Baby,” his two films that won Best Picture Oscars, died Thursday in New York City after a brief illness. She was 61.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2004, Huffman, who cast more than 15 films for Mr. Eastwood, described the process of working with the noted actor/director.

“Sometimes it will be just one person we will talk about (for a role). For example, when we did ‘Bird,’ it was Diane Verona, who played Chan, Charlie Parker’s wife. Clint wanted me to come to New York and look around the jazz scene. Diane came in, we put her on tape, I sent the tape back to him and he took one look at her and said, ‘That’s it.’ That was the end of that. He is not a shopper. He knows what he likes when he sees it.”

Huffman said that Mr. Eastwood preferred looking at tape of auditions instead of watching them in person because he recalled how “painful” auditioning was for him as an actor and “he wants to spare the actor that.”

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Huffman graduated from Webster University in St. Louis and worked for a time as a flight attendant on TWA.

After moving to Los Angeles with her husband, actor David Huffman, in the mid-1970s, she started her career as a casting director at MTM. She moved on to Paramount, where she worked for noted casting director Marion Dougherty. When Ms. Dougherty went to Warner Bros., Huffman went with her. It was there that she began working with Eastwood. The first film she cast for him was “Honkytonk Man” in 1982. Other films she cast for Mr. Eastwood included “Mystic River,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” “A Perfect World,” and “Space Cowboys.”

She eventually became head of casting for Warner’s television division. In television, she cast the pilot of the hit series “Murphy Brown,” which starred Candice Bergen.

Her life in Southern California was marred by tragedy, however. In February 1985, her husband, then 40, was stabbed to death in San Diego’s Balboa Park while trying to chase down a suspect in a mobile home burglary. The assailant, a 16-year-old Mexican national, was arrested and eventually sentenced to 26 years to life in prison.

Huffman, who spoke at the sentencing phase of the trial, soon moved back to New York and restarted her life. She formed her own independent casting company and continued to work for Warner Bros., Hallmark Hall of Fame and Mr. Eastwood’s Malpaso Productions.

She also remarried and is survived by her husband Jules del Vecchio; sons Mathew and Philip Huffman, and a stepson, Matthew del Vecchio. She is also survived by her mother, Grace Grennan; a brother, Chris Grennan, and a sister, Christine Stiller.