Veteran foreign correspondent Sir Charles Wheeler has died after more than 60 years covering the world for the BBC.

The 85-year-old - widely acclaimed as "the reporter's reporter" - died from lung cancer early yesterday but had never given up his passion for journalism. He had been working on a documentary about the Dalai Lama - who he had known for 40 years - right up to his death.

Sir Charles covered many of the great events of the last half of the 20th century: he was the BBC's correspondent in divided Berlin in the early years of the Cold War and was back in the German capital in 1989 to watch the city's wall come down. He also reported events as varied as the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Watergate and the wars in Iraq and Vietnam.

Sir Charles was "utterly irreplaceable", the BBC's director-general, Mark Thompson, said yesterday as tributes poured into the Corporation.

"To audiences and to his colleagues alike, Charles Wheeler was simply a legend," Mr Thomspon added. "His integrity, his authority and his humanity graced the BBC's airwaves over many decades."

Mark Byford, the BBC's head of journalism, said: "Charles was, in my view, the greatest broadcast journalist of his generation. Courageous, insightful and always curious, he had the truly outstanding gift for vivid, beautiful writing matched by a quite extraordinary skill for using pictures and sound to convey the power of his own eye witness reportage.

"As a journalist you saw him as the pinnacle of our profession. His death is a huge loss but his legacy will last forever."

Sir Charles - he was knighted in 2006 for services to broadcasting and journalism - had joined the BBC as a sub-editor in 1947 after serving as a Royal Marine during the war, working in intelligence with James Bond creator Ian Fleming and taking part in the D-Day landings. He was the Corporation's longest-serving foreign correspondent and had reported for a variety of programmes, most notably Panorama, Newsnight and Dateline London.

His reputation was fearsome - as a cantankerous giant in the newsroom who did not suffer fools lightly. Not so, said one of his Newsnight colleagues and his successor as host of Dateline London, Scot Gavin Esler.

Sir Charles, Mr Esler said, was "a very easy person to be a friend of". "That," he explained, "is part of his great reporter's art: people like him."

Sir Charles, however, often found himself in the headlines by showing contempt for certain politicians. In the 1950s he criticised Ceylon's new prime minister as "an inexperienced eccentric at the head of a government of mediocrities". The country, now called Sri Lanka, nearly left the Commonwealth over the remark.

Sir Charles was also scathing of Ronald Reagan and the 1980-1988 US president's dislike of reading and his reliance on video briefings and "instincts". He also told BBC viewers that he had always suspected US President Richard Nixon was at the centre of what was to become the Watergate scandal.

Sir Charles, who was born and brought up in Germany and lived under the Nazis and had a lifelong hatred of tyranny of any kind, was never afraid to criticise his own paymasters. He also stood up for the values of the BBC, which was created when he was just one. But he attacked the BBC for what he saw as the dumbing down of news values and its new-found fascination with the "cult of celebrity".

He is survived by two daughters, barrister Marina who is married to London mayor Boris Johnson, and Shirin, who followed him into the BBC.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: "Charles was one of the great reporters of the television age and covered some of the seminal events of our times."

On the front line Born Selwyn Charles Cornelius-Wheeler, in March 1923, in Hamburg. Educated at a boarding school in Kent before taking his first post in journalism, as a copyboy for the now defunct Daily Sketch newspaper. Enlisted with Royal Marines in 1942 Joined BBC in 1947 as a sub-editor covering Latin America, before becoming the BBC's Berlin correspondent and thorn in the side of the East German regime. Appointed South Asia correspondent in 1958, and a year later met and married Dip Dingh, his Sikh wife. The couple moved to Washington in 1962, which Sir Charles covered for the BBC. Sir Charles became the first presenter of Newsnight before becoming the eminence grise of BBC foreign broadcasting.