Xu Jinglei - the Beijing Film Academy graduate selected by Time Magazine as "the most revolutionary representative of Chinese cinema" - has long been called showbiz's "talented bella".

Xu first captivated public attention as a 20-year-old acting student, who played a policewoman who falls for a gangster in the smash hit TV serial A Romantic Story (1997).

Xu rose to stardom by playing an innocent and refined woman characterized by her girl-next-door image in the popular TV drama Cherish Our Love Forever (1998).

She made her inaugural foray on the big screen with 2002's I Love You. The same year, she played in the Spring Subway and won the best actress award at the Ninth Beijing Student Film Festival.

Xu jumped into directing with My Father and I (2003), a low budget art film exploring the father-daughter relationship.

She cemented her reputation as a talented art-house film director when she brought Stefan Zweig's literary canon A Letter from an Unknown Woman to the silver screen in 2004. That earned her a best director award in that year's San Sebastian International Film Festival, in Spain.

In 2010, Xu filmed her first commercial piece, Go Lala Go!. The film was her highest-grossing work, with a box office revenue exceeding 100 million yuan ($15.8 million).

The actress-turned-director demonstrated her talent in other fields, as she launched her Sina.com blog in 2006, which only took 112 days to break domestic records with more than 10 million visits.

The blog, which featured Xu's loose and upfront writing style, drew more than 60 million clicks to top the Technorati billboard, a leading web-log search engine, making her the most popular blogger in 2006.

That year, she founded Kaila Pictures Corporation, focusing on film and television production. Xu hopes Kaila, which means "opened" in Chinese, will open more possibilities for Chinese cinema.

She used the same name to brand her monthly digital magazine, which she started in April 2007. Xu says Kaila Magazine, which focuses on youth lifestyle, also cultivates relationships with advertisers that might be interested in her film projects.