title: API to retrieve info about famous people
body: <p>I'm looking for some callable way to get information about famous people and celebrities. Given a string, I'd like to determine if it's the name of a famous person, and if so, if they're alive and perhaps what category they fall into (e.g. Actor, Musician, Athlete).</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know of any publicly available APIs to do such a thing? The best I can come up with is Wikipedia, but it's pretty problematic because much of the info must be parsed, and isn't in a reliable and predictable format.</p>
  
  <p>I'd also like to be able to offer suggestions for possible names when the initial search turns up nothing (since the strings will be from people and may contain misspellings).</p>