Understanding the formation and evolution processes of early-type galaxies remains among the most important unsolved problems in present-day astrophysics and cosmology. A reliable and detailed description of the mass-density profile and structural properties of ellipticals through cosmic time is a much-needed step forward but - whereas nearby ellipticals have been thoroughly analyzed - painfully little is known about more distant systems, since observational limitations determine degeneracies in the traditional diagnostic tools. During this talk I will describe a method to overcome these difficulties based on combining in a self-consistent way the information obtained from two independent and complementary techniques: gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics. This provides a robust way to conduct detailed studies of elliptical galaxies beyond the local Universe. I will then detail the results of the application of this method to the analysis of a sample of seven early-type lens-galaxies located in the redshift range z = 0.08 - 0.33, for which both HST imaging observations and two-dimensional kinematic maps (obtained from VLT VIMOS or Keck spectroscopical observations) are available.